This is the best summary I could come up with:

"Big data is this vast mountain," says former Netflix executive Todd Yellin in a video for the website Future of StoryTelling.

Facebook had been keeping track of other websites I'd visited, including a language-learning tool and hotel listings sites.

Netflix told me that what a user has watched and how they've interacted with the app is a better indication of their tastes than demographic data, such as age or gender.

"No one is explicitly telling Netflix that they're gay," says Greg Serapio-Garcia, a PhD student at the University of Cambridge specialising in computational social psychology.

According to Greg, one possibility is that watching certain films and TV shows which are not specifically LGBTQ+ can still help the algorithm predict "your propensity to like queer content".

For me, it's a matter of curiosity, but in countries where homosexuality is illegal, Greg thinks that it could potentially put people in danger.

I'm a bot and I'm open source!