Stretch
I'm pretty sure that websites are profiling me.
This isn't a bad thing. Amazon clearly knows my book browsing and purchase habits so well, it does a better job of picking books for me than any of my friends and family. Algorithmically, it's complicated, but they're basically just cross-referencing what I've bought and looked at with other people who have looked at and bought the same things. So when I land on the homepage tomorrow morning, they'll consult the profile they have on me and build the homepage I see based on that.
Provided they aren't sharing this information without my knowledge, this seems like fair use. What they know about me is fairly limited, because they just know which books I'm buying. (I buy almost everything else offline.)
Facebook is a little bit different. It's not an accident that there are now "Like" buttons all over the web. Provided that we're all logged into Facebook in the same browser we're using to surf the web (most of us are), when you load that news page with the Facebook buttons on it, the data about this page you're visiting is sent right alone for Facebook to store.
So, Facebook is trying to figure out who I am. They're profiling me by compiling a history of every page that I've visited. And, of course, Facebook isn't the only company that's trying to do this.
Should we be worried about this? Maybe. Me, I've been aware of this for quite some time, and I have a little trick that I use to throw them off: I try to look up information about everything.
It's one thing to read a news article with a liberal bent, then to seek one out with a conservative one on the same topic. I do that, but I try to take it further. I look up articles on pottery, sewing, marketing, mathematical models for stock market investing, software for managing a dental practice, computer science, criminal law, publicity, civic engagement in city governments, sales training, the educational system in Europe, urban planning, botany, US companies moving their manufacturing from China to the US, how fireworks are made, how to take care of a firearm...etc.
I would do this anyway, since I'm a pretty curious person. It doesn't necessarily make me smarter, but I hope that it makes the signals I'm sending to Facebook a little bit noisier than they might otherwise be, and make it more of a challenge for them to pigeonhole me.
This is one of the reasons I blog. I try to obligate myself to find new ideas and share them with others. I hope this has the side effect of getting people interested in other random disciplines, and gets them browsing about a few random unrelated tangents. Maybe they in turn blog about a few of them, and the serendipity spreads.
Does this actually happen? I have no idea. In life it's often difficult to tie the effect to its associated causes. I think that's what we're all trying really hard to do: be the cause, unseen or otherwise, of the effects we want to see in the world.
This isn't a bad thing. Amazon clearly knows my book browsing and purchase habits so well, it does a better job of picking books for me than any of my friends and family. Algorithmically, it's complicated, but they're basically just cross-referencing what I've bought and looked at with other people who have looked at and bought the same things. So when I land on the homepage tomorrow morning, they'll consult the profile they have on me and build the homepage I see based on that.
Provided they aren't sharing this information without my knowledge, this seems like fair use. What they know about me is fairly limited, because they just know which books I'm buying. (I buy almost everything else offline.)
Facebook is a little bit different. It's not an accident that there are now "Like" buttons all over the web. Provided that we're all logged into Facebook in the same browser we're using to surf the web (most of us are), when you load that news page with the Facebook buttons on it, the data about this page you're visiting is sent right alone for Facebook to store.
So, Facebook is trying to figure out who I am. They're profiling me by compiling a history of every page that I've visited. And, of course, Facebook isn't the only company that's trying to do this.
Should we be worried about this? Maybe. Me, I've been aware of this for quite some time, and I have a little trick that I use to throw them off: I try to look up information about everything.
It's one thing to read a news article with a liberal bent, then to seek one out with a conservative one on the same topic. I do that, but I try to take it further. I look up articles on pottery, sewing, marketing, mathematical models for stock market investing, software for managing a dental practice, computer science, criminal law, publicity, civic engagement in city governments, sales training, the educational system in Europe, urban planning, botany, US companies moving their manufacturing from China to the US, how fireworks are made, how to take care of a firearm...etc.
I would do this anyway, since I'm a pretty curious person. It doesn't necessarily make me smarter, but I hope that it makes the signals I'm sending to Facebook a little bit noisier than they might otherwise be, and make it more of a challenge for them to pigeonhole me.
This is one of the reasons I blog. I try to obligate myself to find new ideas and share them with others. I hope this has the side effect of getting people interested in other random disciplines, and gets them browsing about a few random unrelated tangents. Maybe they in turn blog about a few of them, and the serendipity spreads.
Does this actually happen? I have no idea. In life it's often difficult to tie the effect to its associated causes. I think that's what we're all trying really hard to do: be the cause, unseen or otherwise, of the effects we want to see in the world.