The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You

Two people with similar socio-economic background and education sit down at keyboards and type identical queries into Google concerning the BP gulf oil disaster. Person one gets 180 million hits. Person two gets 139 million hits. Why the difference?

Our general impression has been that if you want some information you merely type the request in Google, and it will list the pages of interest with the most popular and relevant hits on page 1 of the results.

Wrong.

Those were the old days. Since late 2009 Google now looks at 57 different criteria about you then decides which pages you get to see and the order of the items. It’s called personalization. That means what you see and what I see for the exact same query or the same event, could be very, very different.

Eli Pariser writes in The Filter Bubble:What the Internet is Hiding From You that personalization is the leading edge of creating a bubble that is destroying the promise of the Net as a commons where all can equally share news and experience. The above example is from his book

How is that bubble created? The 57 criteria (please tell me the number is not a Google humour riff on Heinz 57 varieties) filter and influence all search results. Some criteria are based on cookies stored on your machine from previous web sessions. Cookies track surfing habits, what you clicked on; ads you click on always plant a cookie. Should you revisit a site later cookies are updated by your return. Other criteria are collected from your browser search history, your location, your bookmarks, the make and type of computer, even the browser and version of it. Any aspect of your on-line life that can be assigned a number and tracked can become juice for the criteria machine.

So why is this happening? Money! There are buyers for this information. A major point of personalization is to customize the ads you see. Pariser opens the book with a great quote by Andrew Lewis of MetaFilter, “If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold.” Your online habits are now a commodity.

Data miners and aggregators like Acxiom or BlueKai, two companies most people have never heard of, are buying the data and massaging it with other data from credit and other sources to create profiles of people and demographic archetypes which they then sell to marketers. Marketers are enthusiastic to be able to target products specifically to a web visitor to a particular site and even create online ads that appeal to the visitor as the demographic instead of the site overall. So two simultaneous visitors to a site could see different ads or even different products.

But why are the search returns so different? It’s an effort to holds your interest and keep you happily surfing longer with more data being collected for your profile. The algorithms are designed to show you sights based on your past experience.

What are you missing?

Author Eli Pariser, former exec.dir. of MoveOn and co-founder of Avaaz.org

That is the real and serious question that Pariser raises. If the “system” only rewards you with more of the same, then you surf the web in a bubble. Serendipity, sudden delightful (or nasty) discovery are lost. Bad news will not interfere with your pleasures. (Unless all your surfing is about bad news, then that’s all you will get). Slowly you become a bubble of one. Pariser, in a TED talk, illustrated how two friends googled Egypt at the height of Arab spring. One got only travel information and no news of confrontations in Tahrir square, the other got mostly  political content. He also noted that many links from conservative sources in his Facebook wall suddenly disappeared one day and were replaced by progressive items.

Yup, Facebook, with its notoriously shifting privacy controls, also has a personalization engine. You can see that with the new “timeline” and what FB thinks should get priority. So do Yahoo and Amazon, and large news sites, New York Times, Washington Post, Huffington Post also are testing the idea, according to Pariser.

So here is the rub. A promise of the internet was an enlightenment, a chance to access the world. But if search engines only reflect back a variation of what we have already viewed, we lose. In politics, if progressives only see positive statements about, say the Occupy movement, and conservatives only see negative statements, how will meaningful political dialogue ever be engaged in? Can we let a few American companies unilaterally decide how we see the Net through forced user-ship of their opaque filtering algorithms.

The Filter Bubble is the most important book I have read this year. I knew personalization was taking place but had never taken the time to think about it and potential impact. I have worked as a journalist, consider myself a critical thinker and am now concerned that I may miss the material I need to make decisions. I don’t like being manipulated. I expect to receive empirical information in a search, not marketing nuance. I agree with Pariser’s final statement, “Protecting the early vision of radical connectedness and user control should be an urgent priority for all of us”.

If you want to start taking control visit the Filter Bubble website on this direct link (with no cookies from me). I found 84 companies tracking me. What’s your count? Use the reply form to let me know.