[P2P-F] Fwd: Book Review on the filter bubble

Mon Jun 27 13:45:59 CEST 2011

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From: James Quilligan <jbquilligan at comcast.net>
Date: Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 6:28 PM

A dystopian view of online freedoms

Review by Christopher Caldwell

Published: June 26 2011 22:41 | Last updated: June 26 2011 22:41

For at least a decade people have been predicting that the internet, as it
matured, would become a more personalised experience for its users. MIT
technology expert Nicholas Negroponte saw people sampling television and
newspapers, rigging up a “Daily Me” to fit their curiosity. The Chicago
professor (and later White House regulator) Cass Sunstein was more
pessimistic. He worried that a tailor-made web experience would isolate
citizens, turning the internet into a tawdry, ideological, anti-intellectual
place. People would figure out what they liked and gorge themselves on it.
But for better or for worse, it was assumed, this personalisation would be
carried out by the free users of an open, democratic internet. *The Filter
Bubble*, by the internet political activist Eli Pariser, is the story of how
that didn’t happen.

It is “the filtering goliaths”, as Pariser calls them – Google, YouTube,
Amazon, Facebook and others – who set the rules of personalisation. You may
think you are using their search engines but they are actually using you.
Your surfing habits and mouse-clicks reveal what news you want to see, what
products you want to buy and what kind of arguments will close any sale.
Advertisers are getting better and better at using this information to
entice and exploit. “Personalised filters play to the most compulsive parts
of you,” Pariser writes. The internet is not personalised the way a bespoke
suit is personalised – to better fit your particular tastes. It is
personalised the way a blackmail note is personalised – to better fit your
particular vulnerabilities.

This danger was well understood by the pioneers of search. When Larry Page
and Sergey Brin were developing Google, they hoped such companies would stay
in the non-profit sector. “We expect that advertising-funded search engines
will be inherently biased towards the advertisers,” they wrote, “and away
from the needs of consumers.” They were right, but they were unable to
resist the lure of advertising-driven search themselves, so that is the
world we have.

The internet we were promised bears little relation to the one we got. We
once thought that anonymity would allow users to experiment and explore. But
since identifying peoples’ predilections is so profitable, companies are now
hard at work “de- anonymising” the web. Newspapers and other media, as
Pariser sees it, must reinvent themselves as “behavioural data companies”.
On the one hand, this might make us safer – an internet data-tracking and
marketing company called Acxiom turned up more information on 11 of the 19
September 11 hijackers than the entire US government was able to. But
Pariser fears that “the new, personalised Web may no longer be as
well-suited for creative discovery as it once was”.

A second problem is asymmetry of information. The search goliaths know more
about their customers than their customers know about them, especially in
the US. There, the law does not require data-sifting companies to tell
customers what data has been gathered on them. “It’s an entirely reasonable
expectation,” Pariser writes, “that data that users provide to companies
ought to be available to us.” Right on.

Pariser is a rambling writer. He tends to answer questions by flinging
anecdotes at them. His book lacks an overarching argument. What it has,
though, is a solid moral compass and an appealing dystopian bent. Pariser is
an excellent debunker of internet clichés. Bill Clinton was wrong, he shows,
to claim that China’s efforts to crack down on the internet were “sort of
like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall”. Governments can control the web
much more easily than we think. The much-vaunted “cloud” consists of only a
handful of companies, which is what made it such a simple matter to take
WikiLeaks offline in 2010. More disturbing, privacy laws have not caught up
with technology, and most people’s e-mails pass through unprotected
constitutional space – the servers of, say, Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail. And
see how much privacy will remain, once the ability to search faces easily
gets added to the internet.

“We need to start thinking of personal data as a kind of personal property,”
Pariser writes. If he is correct – and he is – then what we think of as a
question of technology is actually a question of justice. Why is it, for
example, that, “while it’s illegal to use Brad Pitt’s image to sell a watch
without his permission, Facebook is free to use your name to sell one to
your friends”? Pariser comes as close as anyone has to explaining the
misgivings that a lot of internet users feel. Boon though it is, there is
something about the web as it is now exists that threatens to make us less
creative, less productive and less free.

*The writer is an FT columnist*

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