Most of us are aware that our web experience is somewhat customized by our browsing history, social graph and other factors. But this sort of information-tailoring takes place on a much more sophisticated, deeper and far-reaching level than we dare suspect. (Did you know that Google takes into account 57 individual data points before serving you the results you searched for?)
Eli Pariser, founder of public policy advocacy group MoveOn.org describes the notion of filter bubbles, how they work, and what impact they have on our online experience.
' Your filter bubble is the personal universe of information that you live in online — unique and constructed just for you by the array of personalized filters that now power the web. Facebook contributes things to read and friends’ status updates, Google personally tailors your search queries, and Yahoo News and Google News tailor your news. It’s a comfortable place, the filter bubble — by definition, it’s populated by the things that most compel you to click. But it’s also a real problem: the set of things we’re likely to click on (sex, gossip, things that are highly personally relevant) isn’t the same as the set of things we need to know.
I came across a Google blog post declaring that search was personalized for everyone, and it blew my mind. I had no idea that Google was tailoring its search results on an individual basis at all — the last I’d heard, it was showing everyone the same “authoritative” results. I got out my computer and tried it with a friend, and the results were almost entirely different. And then I discovered that Google was far from the only company that was doing this. In fact, nearly every major website is, in one way or another. (Wikipedia is a notable exception.)
Personalization is sort of privacy turned inside out: it’s not the problem of controlling what the world knows about you, it’s the problem of what you get to see of the world. We ought to have more control over that — one of the most pernicious things about the filter bubble is that mostly it’s happening invisibly — and we should demand it of the companies we use.'
Read the interview with Eli in full here and watch Eli Pariser's TED Talk here:
As Eli explians in his talk, every search you conduct on the web results in a highly personalised set of results. Your results will likely be different to someone else's search for the same thing. The search engine's algorithim decides what results it will show. Is this helpful or too controlling?
What do you think?
Image source
It is proposed that individuals should have the ability to search the internet without the personalised filters imposed by internet search engines