WHAT ARE FACEBOOK & GOOGLE HIDING ?

INFORMATION HIDING 

"A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa ."            

       —>  Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder 

Here is an eye opening post on how the 'hidden rise of personalization on the Internet' is controlling-and limiting-the information we consume....Shocking but true.... :(

There is no standard 'GOOGLE' anymore and no more does the genuine so called 'most popular social network website 'FACEBOOK' exists either....

Programs do what you tell them, which is not always what you expect them to do. The Google search engine that you expect to find you the best and most informative news about a given query is really finding you the best and most informative news about a given subject, as it understands "best" and "informative," as what is relevant to you . So if you want to create a search tool that finds the news you need to know, rather than the news you want to read, where do you begin..?

Here is an experiment by me showing discrepancy in google search :

 I and one friend of mine decided that we should search the query "Gujarat" on our machines using same browser and same search engine "Google" . Here are the screenshots of results we received :

Same query but different results with different search times....

You could say that on December 4, 2009, the era of personalization began.

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.

You all would be surprised to know that Google uses almost fifty-seven tracking signals — everything from where you were logging in from to what browser you were using to what you had searched for before — to make guesses about who you were and what kinds of sites you’d like. Even if you were logged out, it would customize its results, showing you the pages it predicted you were most likely to click on.

One fine morning while chatting with my friend on facebook I asked him to type in query 'jihadi' and send me the screenshot of whatever result he has got . I too searched the same from my machine.

When I compared the screenshots of our results it was to my utter surprise that both our search results were different ....his result contained 'The bin Laden aftermath: The Internet jihadis react ' related news while mine showed general info about jehadi ; their networks and 'jehadi suicide bombers'......This was like a completely different world from one person to another.

You don't have a good picture of the world. You don't know what you see is just the part of the picture that reflects what you want to see, not the whole picture. What is being revealed to you about the world is based on who you are....

The top 50 websites collect an average of 64 bits of personal information each time we visit — and then custom-design their sites to conform to our perceived preferences. You must have noticed that whenever we log into our account on Youtube , we are shown a list of recommended channels and videos .Their selection based on the videos already watched by you .What impact will this online filtering have on the future ??


And especially on Facebook this is a problem, because the way that information is transmitted on Facebook is with the ‘like’ button is completely unknown to you .These like buttons are the ones prioritizing our information on Facebook. It’s easy to click ‘like’ on ‘I became the topper this semester’ or ‘I really cooked delicious food today.’ But it’s very hard to click ‘like’ on ‘war in Afghanistan enters its 10th year' or 'Baba Ramdev & Anna Hazare to go on a hunger strike in opposition to corruption'....

All you must have been aware of the new Facebook settings introduced which shows the news feeds on your profile only from certain friends classifying other friends as conservative ones. Moreover Facebook doesnt have the courtesy to inform its billion of users about the new settings. 'Top news' ends up being mostly videos and news posts shared by other friends since video and web links tend to get the most response as well. It suggests that Facebook merely weighs the relationships in its 'Top news' algorithm . Also Facebook has the power to hide certain friends' requests without our own consent .

MORE PRIORITIZING TO HARASS YOU 

• Already launched social news site XYDO, aims to prioritize and organize online news based on each user’s social graph and interests.XYDO gathers news from tens of thousands of online sources, matches articles against what users are sharing and talking about on Facebook and Twitter, and then sorts pages by vote counts. Total vote count includes onsite upvotes as well as Facebook or Twitter shares. The user can view news made by popular by the entire XYDO network, see stories popular in their social graph or view trending news items by topic.

• In 2008, the company Microsoft launched an iPhone app that pulls feeds into one app, learns what kind of content the user likes, and then prioritizes that kind of content.   

• Twitter extension 'Mashable' for Chrome that adds a tab to Twitter to prioritize tweets based on user behavior.

INVISIBLE FILTERS

Here is a core of Eli Pariser's (he is the author of the best seller of the week 'The filter bubble : What the Internet is hiding from you' ) argument:

"We really need to get away from that silly idea that code doesn't care about anything."

Personalized filters and algorithms are controlling the Web, creating individual packets 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 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 data companies are tracking your personal information ranging from political interests to the color you painted your living room . :O


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


Personalization would destroy the Internet's original purpose as an open platform for the spread of ideas and could leave us all in an isolated, echoing world.... :(

Where are we gonna waste our time when the web becomes intelligent?