In most cases, the result is a more helpful, more usable online experience. Less trawling through web sites to get what you need, less filling out forms and faffing to get things done.
Do they know you too well?
Personalisation can be extremely powerful, is usually done furtively, and has the potential for great harm. It was one of the techniques that Cambridge Analytica relied on to secretly sow hatred in electoral campaigns worldwide, by playing on people’s personal fears.
Recent research shows that the public are concerned. Polling suggests “that fewer than a third of Britons ‘trust platforms to target them in a responsible way’, and that almost two-thirds, 61%, ‘favoured greater regulatory oversight of online targeting.”
As with any technology, there will be good and bad implementations.
Here are a few case studies of personalisation in the wild to help us understand this technology and how it might affect us in unseen ways.
Online ads discriminate by design
Web advertisers, like Google, operate by promising to target adverts very accurately to people based on who they are and what they like. These automated decisions often seem to encode social biases although we almost never know exactly how they really work. Given this opacity, researchers are usually left to probe such systems with experiments to deduce how they actually function under the hood.
In a potent example from 2015 researchers reported that “female job seekers are much less likely to be shown adverts on Google for highly paid jobs than men… We found that males were shown ads encouraging the seeking of coaching services for high paying jobs more than females.”
Facebook feeds you news only as “you like it”
According to Facebook, the “News Feed ranking creates a personalized and diverse stream of posts from the people, news sources, businesses and communities you’ve connected with on Facebook.”
“To see what influences the order of posts you’re seeing in your News Feed: Go to the post. Click in the top right and select Why am I seeing this post?”
However, even if you try to find out, most people will never really know why Facebook shows you what you see, and what it’s hiding from you too. Is uses so much data and in so many ways that a full explanation would be a little like learning a new language.
In cases like the Cambridge Analytica debacle, we are still living with the effects of that personalisation today. Facebook allowed political campaigners to show people problematic propaganda, segmenting users based on data gleaned via Facebook. The ads were targeted to prey on people’s fears and urge them to vote a certain way. Facebook profited and democracy suffered.
Cupid captures your soul
Tinder is one of the leading online matchmakers gathering data in the service of love. What they know about you, they use to pick potential lovers, as explained in this Guardian investigation.
“So why does Tinder need all that information on you? ‘To personalise the experience for each of our users around the world,’ according to a Tinder spokesperson. ‘Our matching tools are dynamic and consider various factors when displaying potential matches in order to personalise the experience for each of our users.’”