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The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You Hardcover – May 12, 2011

4.3 out of 5 stars 366

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An eye-opening account of how the hidden rise of personalization on the Internet is controlling-and limiting-the information we consume.

In December 2009, Google began customizing its search results for each user. Instead of giving you the most broadly popular result, Google now tries to predict what you are most likely to click on. According to MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser, Google's change in policy is symptomatic of the most significant shift to take place on the Web in recent years-the rise of personalization. In this groundbreaking investigation of the new hidden Web, Pariser uncovers how this growing trend threatens to control how we consume and share information as a society-and reveals what we can do about it.

Though the phenomenon has gone largely undetected until now, personalized filters are sweeping the Web, creating individual universes of information for each of us. Facebook-the primary news source for an increasing number of Americans-prioritizes the links it believes will appeal to you so that if you are a liberal, you can expect to see only progressive links. Even an old-media bastion like
The Washington Post devotes the top of its home page to a news feed with the links your Facebook friends are sharing. Behind the scenes a burgeoning industry of data companies is tracking your personal information to sell to advertisers, from your political leanings to the color you painted your living room to the hiking boots you just browsed on Zappos.

In a personalized world, we will increasingly be typed and fed only news that is pleasant, familiar, and confirms our beliefs-and because these filters are invisible, we won't know what is being hidden from us. Our past interests will determine what we are exposed to in the future, leaving less room for the unexpected encounters that spark creativity, innovation, and the democratic exchange of ideas.

While we all worry that the Internet is eroding privacy or shrinking our attention spans, Pariser uncovers a more pernicious and far- reaching trend on the Internet and shows how we can- and must-change course. With vivid detail and remarkable scope,
The Filter Bubble reveals how personalization undermines the Internet's original purpose as an open platform for the spread of ideas and could leave us all in an isolated, echoing world.

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Author Q&A with Eli Pariser

Q: What is a “Filter Bubble”?

A: We’re used to thinking of the Internet like an enormous library, with services like Google providing a universal map. But that’s no longer really the case. Sites from Google and Facebook to Yahoo News and the New York Times are now increasingly personalized – based on your web history, they filter information to show you the stuff they think you want to see. That can be very different from what everyone else sees – or from what we need to see.

Your filter bubble is this unique, personal universe of information created just for you by this array of personalizing filters. It’s invisible and it’s becoming more and more difficult to escape.

Q: I like the idea that websites might show me information relevant to my interests—it can be overwhelming how much information is available I already only watch TV shows and listen to radio programs that are known to have my same political leaning. What’s so bad about this?

A: It’s true: We’ve always selected information sources that accord with our own views. But one of the creepy things about the filter bubble is that we’re not really doing the selecting. When you turn on Fox News or MSNBC, you have a sense of what their editorial sensibility is: Fox isn’t going to show many stories that portray Obama in a good light, and MSNBC isn’t going to the ones that portray him badly. Personalized filters are a different story: You don’t know who they think you are or on what basis they’re showing you what they’re showing. And as a result, you don’t really have any sense of what’s getting edited out – or, in fact, that things are being edited out at all.

Q: How does money fit into this picture?

A: The rush to build the filter bubble is absolutely driven by commercial interests. It’s becoming clearer and clearer that if you want to have lots of people use your website, you need to provide them with personally relevant information, and if you want to make the most money on ads, you need to provide them with relevant ads. This has triggered a personal information gold rush, in which the major companies – Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo, and the like – are competing to create the most comprehensive portrait of each of us to drive personalized products. There’s also a whole “behavior market” opening up in which every action you take online – every mouse click, every form entry – can be sold as a commodity.

Q: What is the Internet hiding from me?

A: As Google engineer Jonathan McPhie explained to me, it’s different for every person – and in fact, even Google doesn’t totally know how it plays out on an individual level. At an aggregate level, they can see that people are clicking more. But they can’t predict how each individual’s information environment is altered.

In general, the things that are most likely to get edited out are the things you’re least likely to click on. Sometimes, this can be a real service – if you never read articles about sports, why should a newspaper put a football story on your front page? But apply the same logic to, say, stories about foreign policy, and a problem starts to emerge. Some things, like homelessness or genocide, aren’t highly clickable but are highly important.

Q: Which companies or Websites are personalizing like this?

A: In one form or another, nearly every major website on the Internet is flirting with personalization. But the one that surprises people most is Google. If you and I Google the same thing at the same time, we may get very different results. Google tracks hundreds of “signals” about each of us – what kind of computer we’re on, what we’ve searched for in the past, even how long it takes us to decide what to click on – and uses it to customize our results. When the result is that our favorite pizza parlor shows up first when we Google pizza, it’s useful. But when the result is that we only see the information that is aligned with our religious or social or political beliefs, it’s difficult to maintain perspective.

Q: Are any sites being transparent about their personalization?

A: Some sites do better than others. Amazon, for example, is often quite transparent about the personalization it does: “We’re showing you Brave New World because you bought 1984.” But it’s one thing to personalize products and another to personalize whole information flows, like Google and Facebook are doing. And very few users of those services are even marginally aware that this kind of filtering is at work.

Q: Does this issue of personalization impact my privacy or jeopardize my identity at all?

A: Research psychologists have known for a while that the media you consume shapes your identity. So when the media you consume is also shaped by your identity, you can slip into a weird feedback loop. A lot of people see a simple version of this on Facebook: You idly click on an old classmate, Facebook reads that as a friendship, and pretty soon you’re seeing every one of John or Sue’s posts.

Gone awry, personalization can create compulsive media – media targeted to appeal to your personal psychological weak spots. You can find yourself eating the equivalent of information junk food instead of having a more balanced information diet.

Q: You make it clear that while most Websites’ user agreements say they won’t share our personal information, they also maintain the right to change the rules at any time. Do you foresee sites changing those rules to profit from our online personas?

A: They already have. Facebook, for example, is notorious for its bait-and-switch tactics when it comes to privacy. For a long time, what you “Liked” on Facebook was private, and the site promised to keep it that way. Then, overnight, they made that information public to the world, in order to make it easier for their advertisers to target specific subgroups.

There’s an irony in the fact that while Rolex needs to get Tom Cruise’s permission to put his face on a billboard, it doesn’t need to get my permission to advertise my endorsement to my friends on Facebook. We need laws that give people more rights in their personal data.

Q: Is there any way to avoid this personalization? What if I’m not logged into a site?

A: Even if you’re not logged into Google, for example, an engineer told me there are 57 signals that the site uses to figure out who you are: whether you’re on a Mac or PC or iPad, where you’re located when you’re Googling, etc. And in the near future, it’ll be possible to “fingerprint” unique devices, so that sites can tell which individual computer you’re using. That’s why erasing your browser cookies is at best a partial solution—it only partially limits the information available to personalizers.

What we really need is for the companies that power the filter bubble to take responsibility for the immense power they now have – the power to determine what we see and don’t see, what we know and don’t know. We need them to make sure we continue to have access to public discourse and a view of the common good. A world based solely on things we “Like” is a very incomplete world.

I’m optimistic that they can. It’s worth remembering that newspapers weren’t always informed by a sense of journalistic ethics. They existed for centuries without it. It was only when critics like Walter Lippman began to point out how important they were that the newspapers began to change. And while journalistic ethics aren’t perfect, because of them we have been better informed over the last century. We need algorithmic ethics to guide us through the next.

Q: What are the business leaders at Google and Facebook and Yahoo saying about their responsibilities?

A: To be honest, they’re frustratingly coy. They tend to frame the trend in the passive tense: Google’s Eric Schmidt recently said “It will be very hard for people to watch or consume something that has not in some sense been tailored for them,” rather than “Google is making it very hard…” Mark Zuckerberg perfectly summed up the tension in personalization when he said “A squirrel dying in your front yard may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.” But he refuses to engage with what that means at a societal level – especially for the people in Africa.

Q: Your background is as a political organizer for the liberal Website MoveOn.org. How does that experience inform your book?

A: I’ve always believed the Internet could connect us all together and help create a better, more democratic world. That’s what excited me about MoveOn – here we were, connecting people directly with each other and with political leaders to create change.

But that more democratic society has yet to emerge, and I think it’s partly because while the Internet is very good at helping groups of people with like interests band together (like MoveOn), it’s not so hot at introducing people to different people and ideas. Democracy requires discourse and personalization is making that more and more elusive.

And that worries me, because we really need the Internet to live up to that connective promise. We need it to help us solve global problems like climate change, terrorism, or natural resource management which by their nature require massive coordination, and great wisdom and ingenuity. These problems can’t be solved by a person or two – they require whole societies to participate. And that just won’t happen if we’re all isolated in a web of one.

Review

 “Well-timed…a powerful indictment of the current system.” — THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

“Eli Pariser is no enemy of the Internet. The 30-year-old online organizer is the former executive director and now board president of the online liberal political group MoveOn.org. But while Pariser understands the influence of the Internet, he also knows the power of online search engines and social networks to control exactly how we get information—for good and for ill.” —
TIME Magazine

“[An] important new inquiry into the dangers of excessive personalization… entertaining… provocative.” —
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

“Fascinating…a compelling deep-dive into the invisible algorithmic editing on the web, a world where we're being shown more of what algorithms think we
want to see and less of what we should see.” — ATLANTIC.COM

“Pariser’s vision of the Internet’s near future is compelling.” —
THE BOSTON GLOBE

"Chilling."
THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Press (May 12, 2011)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1594203008
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1594203008
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.2 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.75 x 1.25 x 8.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 out of 5 stars 366

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Eli Pariser
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Eli Pariser is the board president and former executive director of MoveOn.org, which at five million members is one of the largest citizens' organizations in American politics. During his time leading MoveOn, he sent 937,510,800 e-mails to members in his name. He has written op-eds for The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal and has appeared on The Colbert Report, Good Morning America, Fresh Air, and World News Tonight.

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
366 global ratings
Data on you
4 Stars
Data on you
The Filter Bubble.Each time we surf the net our experience is tailored for us. The results come back biased based on data already collected about our likes and dislikes. Eli Pariser lays out his concerns about how the hidden "personalisation" could affect our ability to innovate, think independently and act.Based on review by Paul Donoughue in Sunday Mail. 24 July 2011.
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Top reviews from the United States

Reviewed in the United States on July 15, 2011
Imagine this scenario,

"A personalization device in the sanctuary will read your data from your cell phone as you walk into worship, and will select individualized music for you for worship so you can sing your own song, while others around you sing the songs selected for them that match their preferences, all based on an algorithm developed by, but not understood by, technicians at Google."

This is not a scenario Eli Pariser describes in his book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, but it is a scenario I as a pastor imagined as a possibility after reading his book.

Eli Pariser's central thesis is that the development of personalization algorithms on search engines and social networks (his primary, but not exclusive, targets here are Google and Facebook), means that each of us is increasingly (and often unwittingly) experiencing a personalized and filtered bubble of information. And inasmuch as we are doing so, we aren't experiencing the free range of connections and ideas that a true democracy or open system would expose us to.

The book itself is a rather breathless and inspiring tour of the landscape of contemporary media and the digital age. You can read it profitably just on that level, as brief explorations into the development of some of the major institutions and networks that now shape our days. If you've read a bit of history of Google or Facebook, some of it won't be that new, but the stories are well told.

Much of it is new, at least to me. I had no idea that perhaps the largest database of personal information in the world is located in Conway, Arkansas! Acxiom was utilized after 9/11 to find information about the terrorists who flew the planes. They know pretty much everything about you. Seriously.

My two take-aways. First, it's worth knowing that the web is now personalized to you, personally. When you do a Google search for "Lutheran Confessions" from your computer, you will get a different set of results than, say, a person sitting at a desktop computer in a small town across the country who holds different political views than yourself. Each search is personalized based on 59 or so pieces of data about your geographical and social location, including what kind of browser you use, what your past search history was like, and so on.

Second, one of Eli Parisers most intriguing suggestions is that web designers need to build more "drift" and serendipity into the system, and each of us needs to find our own ways to drift as well. What this means in practice is that, instead of getting your news and information from the four or five web sites you visit each day, you may want to venture out into uncharted territory--international newspapers, new blogs written by people who think very differently from yourself, etc. And those who write algorithms shaping where we go on the web should build some of that serendipity into the programs they write as well.

Somewhat inexplicably, Eli Pariser doesn't point out in his book that you can turn these personalization features off on Google and Facebook. But he is collecting ideas and insights at his web site for the book, so we can all post responses and insights there. In fact, reading the web site, I see he's added information like what I've just mentioned in order to expand on and improve his book. Here's the link: [ ... ] Eli Pariser has written a GREAT book. I recommend it highly.
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Reviewed in the United States on May 3, 2012
It's a good book and a quick read. Pariser asks some provocative questions. But he doesn't offer a lot of solutions. A government regulatory agency that supervises these data collectors does not sound like a good idea to me. The only people I want to have my personal info less than salesmen are bureaucrats. Pariser mentions the movie Minority Report - I'm thinking Enemy of the State. RFIDS cost about a nickel apiece, and it's been nearly 15 years since people started thinking about all the ways they could deploy them. So what are some ways of getting out of the filter bubble?

First, limit the amount of info you're giving away. Assume you're always being watched, and act accordingly. Don't carry a smartphone everywhere. Use cash. Search on something other than Google. Use TOR or some other anonymizing web service. Get off Facebook. Remember that everything you post to any website you don't personally own probably becomes someone else's property, and that the stuff you post on your own site can be copied and saved by anybody. Forever.

And from the network perspective, it's never been easier for regular people to communicate, and it doesn't have to be through the commercial web. WIMAX base stations are cheap, and can easily connect entire towns and cities into networks that don't depend on the AT&Ts and Time Warner Cables of the world. Those networks won't have Netflix or YouTube on them (or much porn, either), but if that's all we're really looking for, then it's already too late.
Reviewed in the United States on May 15, 2013
Client problem
A lot of our clients are struggling with the speed of change. In social media, in marketing and in customer behavjour. They are also struggling with innovation .

Future bubble
A friend (thanks Alan Boyd) recommended "Filter Bubble". Boy(d) am I impressed. It is a book that covers the impact of the introduction of personalised search. My search results on "soccer" will be very different than yours (Ajax!). And that has all kinds of consequences.

Touches on privacy, data, innovation, culture, the role of news, democracy, marketing, selling, tracking, etc.

Other books
Reminds me of "From Gutenberg to Zuckerberg" and how the internet can be a source of good, but also a source of evil (like the invention of the book, that opened knowledge to the masses, but was then uses as a way to enforce dogmas though books such as the bible). Also reminds me of "Brandwashed", a nasty book about marketing.

If you had any doubts about the internet after reading "Future minds" and "The shallows", you be even more concerned. Big brother has arrived and is called Acxiom (billions of data profiles), Bluecavia (database of every computer, mobile device, piece of hardware), Google and Facebook.

Why is that important to business?
- Personalised search will make it more difficult to reach your target market.
- Personalised search will impact on your innovation capability.
- With the available data you can pinpoint clients to a very high degree.
- With the available data and technology you can influence buying behaviour in ways that you can't even imagine.
- Data is everything.
- You have to decide how ethical you want to be on data, tracking, influencing, branding and selling.
- Expect a backlash if you are not.

New terms
Learned lots of new words:
- Attention crash
- Click signals
- Retargeting
- Advertar
- Naive realisme (we believe the world is as it appears to be)
- Confirmation bias
- Clickstreams
- Information obesity

Some interesting facts
Did you know that:
- The top 50 sites install 64 cookies each on your computer to track your behaviour
- 36% of Americans get their news through social media sites
- Yahoo uses the stream of search queries to make news
- 15% of Americans believed that Obama is Muslim.
- The percentage had doubled
- Targeted persuasion styles can increase effectiveness of marketing material by 30-40%
- The Netflix algorithm is better at making recommendations than you
- LinkedIn can forecast where you will be in 5 years time
- Personalisation will become the new marketing
- The next attractive man or woman who friends you on Facebook could turn out to be an advertisement for a bag of chips
- That in the future websites will morph to your personal preferences to increase your purchase intentions

The consequence
We are dumbing down, hyper focus and bias displaces general knowledge, context, contrast, discovery, serendipity and ultimately innovation and creativity.

You literally become what you click. As with food, you are what information you consume (picture information obesity). With as the ultimate consequence an identity loop and the threat of monoculture (1984).

What if.......
Through manipulation, curation, context and information flow you can be managed. Imagine a world where Google searches, Facebook likes, your e-mails, your documents (Google docs!), your DNA, your location data from your iPhone or Android, RFID on all the items you bought, the data from your cookies on your computer and more are all combined and are then used to:
- sell
- manipulate
- influence

The cloud is just a handful of companies. What would happen if Google would do evil and Facebook goes into politics (!!!).

A passionate plea
To end with the author;

As billions come online in India and Brazil and Africa, the Internet is transforming into a truly global place. Increasingly, it will be the place where we live our lives. But in the end, a small group of American companies may unilaterally dictate how billions of people work, play, communicate, and understand the world. Protecting the early vision of radical connectedness and user control should be an urgent priority for all of us.

The lessons for business; opportunity, threat, be aware, take a position
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Top reviews from other countries

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Angel Omar Rojas Pacheco
5.0 out of 5 stars great book
Reviewed in Brazil on May 24, 2022
love this book.
Martin Ward
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book
Reviewed in Canada on November 11, 2019
Great book
nancy santos cortes
5.0 out of 5 stars Fascinating!!
Reviewed in Mexico on December 11, 2018
Great!!!!!
Client d'Amazon
5.0 out of 5 stars Très intéressant
Reviewed in France on February 5, 2020
Sujet toujours actuel. Ce livre datant déjà de quelques années, il semble aujourd'hui encore plus juste - ce qui est rare pour les ouvrages de ce type. Agréable à lire - bon pour les neurones en restant détendu.
Patrick Joseph Cassidy
5.0 out of 5 stars Beware!
Reviewed in Spain on March 22, 2016
Watched the presentation by Eli Pariser, them decided to buy the book, it's an eye opener and every one should be more aware and informed as to just how internet works.