Posted on 05/31/2011 12:22:55 PM PDT by VideoDoctor
What Google And Facebook Are Hiding... from me and from you. And it is different for each of us. When can "customization," unbeknownst to the customer, become problematic? And that's putting it nicely.
I think this is worth watching. Please watch it. Less than 10 minutes.
(Excerpt) Read more at eclectipundit.com ...
Blocked @ work - anyone got a summary?
Why not at least give a little summary instead of just a teasser?
General speaking it's revealing that we are being fed what they want us to see.. NOT what WE WANT to see.
The full video is a TED presentation and makes a very substanstial case for what's occurring.
It is only hid from those know do not look.
Thanks for posting. Great vid.
This is one of the reasons I really like FreeRepublic. While it is a conservative forum, I get exposed to all the sources... with complimentary BARF alerts, of course!
;-)
I'm assuming that would be an overwhelming majority of Internet users.
Simply put: Most folks don't have a clue what's going on.
Don’t they determine what to show you, by using your past searches?
You score a gold star with your comment.
Thats why I use Startpage, not google...
To a small degree YES. But to a larger degree the fact that these algorithms are already at work can only make you skeptical that they will be abused for both FINANCIAL GAIN and CONTROL of INFORMATION even further.
They want personalization to justify showing you what makes them the most money. They’ll rig the results to make them tons of cash, but just enough as to not piss you off.
The only thing I fault Facebook with is how hard they make it for users to opt out of things. It always ends up as your great aunt doing a repost of a status that says “YOUR PRIVACY IS AT RISK! GO HERE > HERE AND HERE THEN UNCHECK THIS AND THEN YOU WILL BE SAFE”
What I find shocking is this guy is upset that the liberals don’t control the media anymore.
In the presentation he says the algorithm used to filter the content doesn’t have ethics like the editors did.
To a small degree? I think it’s more to a very large degree. What good is targeting, if you’re nowhere near the target? It’s better than sifting through billions of choices, besides, it’s how they generate revenue, isn’t it? Personally, I don’t use google or have a facebook account.
We are not on Facebook.
However, we are in process of a commercial project that we think may need social media marketing. Is it possible to have a commercial Facebook page for a product that still safeguards privacy? We will have to place our names and certifications/credentials out there for this project, so the simple act of marketing becomes marketing ourselves. We will also have a website for the project, so I suppose the combination will end any privacy we still may have? Can you have the little *share this* icon on a website without personally engaging in Twitter, Digg, et al? I really draw the line at Twitter.
We will NOT have any political or even vaguely ideological information on the website. With another website for another product and a Paypal account, plus some eBay sales, I assume we have little privacy left, anyway?
I have asked a couple of savvy friends, both of whom have a commercial page, but they seem vague on this question. One, however, is fairly certain her business has been targeted for her conservative activism, but she can’t really prove it.
I think you missed the point of this guys presentation. He wants to force them to present “ethical” info to the users.
In other words, a liberal has to approve what you see. Or at least they need to force some liberal news into the majority of conservative users.
Of course, we need filters. There’s too much information available not to have them. Our Google searches are filters, but he argues that Google adds an algorithmic filter of it’s own based on personal information about you. This means we don’t know what isn’t showing up in our searches. (Of course, that’s always true. We don’t know what isn’t showing up and most information won’t show up because there’s too much.) But that’s one point of the presentation and he makes a pretty good case.
The far more dangerous point he makes is when he points out the old media had “editor” gatekeepers as filters and the internet has algorithmic gatekeepers as filters. Then he says (paraphrasiing) “the problem is, the algorithmic gatekeepers haven’t developed the ethical standards of the old ethical gatekeepers.” He wants the new gatekeepers to “encode the sense of civic responsibility” that the old media did.
Of course, the old editor gatekeepers were leftists like Dan Rather, Walter Cronkite et al. with their highly refined ethical sense and the speaker longs for the good old days of “ethics.”
No system is perfect but I’d rather trust a medium that has machines filtering stuff and where alternative filters are available rather than the old media, which presented an almost uniform worldview and uniform filters, and still does. If authorities are allowed or encouraged to monkey with the automated filters, we will end up with leftist, uniform worldview filters that force us to eat our peas and make sure that “bad” stories about Zero don’t get a lot of hits.
No, I got his point and beyond.
My concern is this is the "tip of iceberg" in the sense that it is only what is known or seen at this moment.
This is exactly how the Federal Government reached it's current point of being OUT of CONTROL in regard to the average taxpayer..
It all started some time ago and has currently arrived at where we are today.
I see this happening, eventually in it's own way, with the Internet.
Keep in mind the MACHINES cannot operate without first being given their filtering parameters by HUMAN BEINGS... that, I believe, would include Liberals with MOTIVES for CONTROL and GAIN.
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