Kaliya Hamlin, known as Identity Woman, is the Executive Director of the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium, In 2005 she co-founded the world’s leading industry forum focused on user-centric digital identity, the Internet Identity Workshop. Seeing the emerging possibility of individuals collecting, managing and gaining value from their personal data generated as they interact with all kinds of digital systems, she founded the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium in 2010 to catalyze industry development and collaboration. She identifies as a nymwarrior because she was personally affected by Google’s insistence she use her real name as the headline on her profile along with others fighting for the right to have different, unlinked persona’s, different identifiers for different contexts online.
Eli Pariser discusses some of the problems of filter bubbles online.
As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there’s a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a “filter bubble” and don’t get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.
As major websites, such as google and facebook, use algorithms to filter your searches, your time online is being refined and tailored so much that you might not even realize it. One redditor points out exactly how this happens.
This came up in another thread recently, and it brought up an interesting/alarming situation:
A friend of mine was watching some science/space movies on youtube, and after clicking through the related videos he eventually ended up watching a few videos on the “pole shift” theory (a Y2K-like end-of-the-world scenario). He’s also the type to listen to conspiracy theories just for fun.
After some casual searching, he never really stumbled across any evidence refuting this “pole shift” disaster story, and started thinking it was true. As soon as he brought it up to me, I talked a bit about, from my non-scientist’s opinion of science, why this idea didn’t really make any sense.
Finally I just googled it to convince him, and my first result was the wikipedia page which cited sources disproving the “pole shift” hypothesis.
It was a little scary that his results were tailored this way. After just a cursory search, he was mislead. And unless you are really making an effort to look into something, how often do you click past the first page of Google search results, or even finish the list of results on the first page?
As Eli Pariser noted in the video above, it’s very difficult to stay out of the filter bubble and the unique bubble that you end up living in online. You cannot decide what you get to see and you don’t have the ability to change it on those sites. You do, however, have a few resources on your side. You can add “&pws=0 “ to your searches to turn it off. You can turn off web history in your preferences. You can clear everything in your browser every time you close it.
If you use Chrome, you can browse in incognito mode or use Disconnect or Personal Blocklist. If you use Firefox, you can use Adblock Plus, NoScript, CookieCuller, Better Privacy, HTTPS Everywhere, and Disconnect. You can block Google Analytics and other Google scripts. Instead of searching google, use scroogle. If you want to see how much information google has on you, then check out your dashboard. These are just a few things you can do.
The problem remains, however, in your hands as you must learn about these tools to protect your privacy and your surfing habits online. If you want an unfiltered online experience, you must be the ones to take steps to do so because these companies will not. It takes some time at first, but you’ll be happier and expanding your mind and experiences will be better because of it.
At TEDxMaastricht, Daniel Kraft offers a fast-paced look at the next few years of innovations in medicine, powered by new tools, tests and apps that bring diagnostic information right to the patient’s bedside.
The feeling of security and the reality of security don’t always match, says computer-security expert Bruce Schneier. He explains why we spend billions addressing news story risks, like the “security theater” now playing at your local airport, while neglecting more probable risks — and how we can break this pattern. (Recorded at TEDxPSU, October 2010 at Penn State University in University Park, PA. Duration: 21:05)
