<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">---------- Forwarded message ----------<br>From: <b class="gmail_sendername">James Quilligan</b> <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jbquilligan@comcast.net">jbquilligan@comcast.net</a>></span><br>
Date: Mon, Jun 27, 2011 at 6:28 PM<br><br><br><div style="word-wrap: break-word;"><div style="overflow: hidden; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); background-color: transparent; text-align: left; text-decoration: none; border: medium none;">
<br><br></div><div><h1>A dystopian view of online freedoms</h1><p>Review by Christopher Caldwell
</p><p>Published: June 26 2011 22:41 | Last updated: June 26 2011 22:41</p></div><div><div><p>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
news�papers, 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.</p><div><div><h3><span style="font-weight: normal; font-size: medium;">But
for better or for worse, it was assumed, this personalisation would be
carried out by the free users of an open, democratic internet. </span><span style="font-weight: normal; font-size: medium;"><i>The Filter Bubble</i></span><span style="font-weight: normal; font-size: medium;">, by the internet political activist Eli Pariser, is the story of how that didn�t happen.</span></h3>
</div></div><p>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. </p><p>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. </p><p>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�. </p><p>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.
</p><p>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 clich�s. 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. </p><p>�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.</p><div><br></div><p><i>The writer is an FT columnist</i></p></div></div></div></div><br><br clear="all"><br>-- <br>P2P Foundation: <a href="http://p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://p2pfoundation.net</a>� - <a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net" target="_blank">http://blog.p2pfoundation.net</a> <br>
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