The mirror internet

[Part III]

Although the internet was made for idealistic reasons, today, every click is converted to profit. Internet want to know who you are, what you do and what you want. The aim is to gather as much information as possible and sell it to advertising companies. Let’s say you’re planning a trip to New York this fall. You’re browsing for cheap flights, accommodation and interesting places to visit. Ultimately you don’t buy a ticket, but the information that you were looking is already circulating among advertising companies. Imperceptibly offers to visit the United States appear on your browser.

The algorithm decides what you could potentially be interested in, then bombards the victim with ads urging you to buy. Additionally, it isolates information which it deems not interesting to you. If you’ve never searched in Google anything on Africa, for sure you will not get ads to go to Kilimanjaro. Unless you are a fan of Hemingway, that is.

Personal data protection is at the core of a democratic state. Jet, with impunity, uncontrolled trade of our personal date is the foundation of web networking. There are huge companies like Acxiom, that no one heard of and whose name is even hard to pronounce and remember, which specialize in collecting as much information as possible about us and selling it to interested partners. What does Acxiom know about us? It knows who members of our family are, their names, where they live, whether they use credit cards or have a dog, and if so, what brand of food it gets. According the book by Eli Pariser The Filter Bubble, the list of data on you collected by Acxiom is over 1500.

“Because the filter bubble distorts our perception of what’s important, true, and real, it’s critically important to render it visible” Eli Pariser writes.

The internet instead of opening the world before us is slowly narrowing it down and closing it. We only see the mirror reflection of ourselves. It’s hard to click ‘Like’ next to an article about starvation in Sudan. As the clicks is what counts, heavy and important topics disappear from our sight. Here is another quote:

"Google is great at helping us find what we know we want, but not at finding what we don't know we want."

Moreover, because the trade with all-about-you information is happening behind our backs, the trick is to turn around and reveal the process. It will be like opening not one but many Pandora’s boxes.

[Part I] - click here

[Part II] - click here