Data Skeptic

The data we collect about ourselves can tell us a lot—but only if the technology collecting it actually fits into our lives. Daniel Epstein explores personal informatics, from fitness trackers and food journals to baby tracking and AI, and explains why abandoning a tracking tool doesn't necessarily mean it failed.

In the final episode of our Recommender Systems season, we explore the growing questions of trust, manipulation, privacy, fairness, sustainability, and user control. From fake reviews and shilling attacks to explainable recommendations and user-selected algorithms, we look at what happens when recommender systems must answer not only for what they recommend, but for the consequences of those choices.

In part two of the Data Skeptic Recommender Systems season finale, Kyle asks a deceptively difficult question: what should recommender systems actually optimize for? Drawing on conversations from across the season, the episode explores engagement, filter bubbles, popularity bias, fairness, human curation, embeddings, and the growing role—and risks—of large language models in shaping what gets recommended to us.

Where did recommender systems come from, and how do we know when they're actually working? In part one of Data Skeptic's three-part Recommender Systems finale, Kyle traces the field from collaborative filtering and the Netflix Prize to matrix factorization and modern approaches, while exploring why accuracy alone can't capture what makes a recommendation useful, surprising, or meaningful.

Recommender systems influence nearly every aspect of our digital lives—but what does it mean for those systems to be fair? Robin Burke joins Data Skeptic to discuss the history of recommender systems, the limitations of optimizing purely for accuracy, and how ideas from social choice theory can help balance the needs of users, creators, and society. The conversation explores the future of recommendation algorithms and why fairness is a far more complex challenge than it first appears.