Ask HN: Why Is Everything in Chinese?
5 by scarmig | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Recently, I've been receiving a lot of communications in Chinese. Some examples: * Electronic service agreement updates from Microsoft Azure via email (MS account default language English) * Web ads from PG&E * Certain websites render in Chinese * Some Facebook ads render in Chinese * Spam junk snail mail from State Farm For context, I moved to China at the beginning of 2020 before returning to the US toward the end of last year, accessing the Western web through VPN in the meantime. I don't have an ethnic Chinese name. I've always had English set as my default language for my Google and Facebook accounts. All my devices are configured to use English as the default language. My web browser does request "Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.9,zh-CN;q=0.8,zh;q=0.7", which could maybe explain some of it, though it's obnoxious that the en-US would be overridden. I've never updated any address with any service with my Chinese one, though I guess I did use that one to sign up for Alibaba Cloud. So, what's a good theory? I don't mind seeing stuff in Chinese, per se; it's just surprising, particularly the the snail mail from State Farm, though I guess in principle it's no weirder than the email. My running theory is that I've been tagged in some obscure but widely used database as having Mandarin as my preferred language. Does this seem like a plausible reason? If so, any idea which one it is and which company owns it? My first guesses would be Google or Facebook, but by all appearances they both know I prefer English.