We Are What We Click

March 4, 2021

Ever been followed online by an advertiser? Or dogged by a political party you regrettably contributed to once? Or subjected to repetitive pop-up ads scattered throughout news stories? Unfortunately, this is everyone’s Internet experience because the minute we connect we are under surveillance and leave behind digital fingerprints that are shopped around to advertisers, politicians, or organizations. This harvesting and resale of our bits of information have made Google, Facebook, and Big Tech companies richer than any Rothschild, Ford, Carnegie, or middling nation-state — fortunes based on abrogating our privacy.

Dutch cartoonist Joep Bertrams

The social and search tech business model is just plain unethical and has damaged society, democracy, and human existence. “They are private spy agencies, crossed with ad agencies, which are licensed by us to spy on all of us, all the time, in order to accumulate billions of dollars by manipulating what’s put in front of us over supposedly open and public networks,” wrote computer scientist Jaron Lanier in his excellent 2013 book “Who Owns the Future.”

The capturing of our fingerprints, called “cookies” in Silicon Valley, is why websites remember you and your login information; why shopping websites remember what you bought and can offer you similar items; and it is why social media companies know what you are interested in. None of this is forced upon us, and the good news is that anyone can block the collection of his or her digital fingerprints and can expunge cookies from his or her computer. But few do. And research shows that only 7 percent of people actually read the terms and conditions when signing up for anything online which includes permission to capture and repurpose our data.

The result is a computerized version of “Fatal Attraction” -- one hook-up and we’re toast, unable to extricate ourselves from whatever we once liked, visited, or bought, thanks to perpetual algorithmic nudges.

Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction”

Buying more stuff online isn’t a problem, per se, but the cookie-and-algorithm matrix has placed us all into what’s known as “filter bubbles”, a term coined in 2010 by internet activist Eli Pariser. He foresaw what has come to pass which is the creation of an online environment where people are served up opinions, advertisements, information, websites, organizations, media, and consumer choices that conform to their beliefs and past behavior. “First, you figure out who people are and what they like. Then, you provide them with content and services that best fit them. Finally, you tune to get the fit just right. Your identity shapes your media,” wrote Pariser.

This is the architecture that has contributed to the post-truth era, political polarization, social isolation, and the steadily growing swap-out of human interaction for screens. People have also become addicted to social media and their phones, due to built-in features such as “likes” and pleasant message “dings” (which increase dopamine levels when heard) that keep us coming back for more. Mostly harmless, and not exactly incarceration, filter bubbles and echo chambers generate pleasure for users and profits for corporations but also enable unfettered bias, propaganda, crime, and radicalization.

Filter bubbles feed us back to ourselves. For example, if you search the word “schizophrenia” once on a site, its cookies will be stored on your computer, which identifies you to other sites and advertisers as someone who’s interested in mental illnesses, and may buy antidepressants, visit certain websites, or attend clinics. From then on, while you’re browsing on your computer, you will be pestered by pertinent ads and sites. Likewise, if you retweet or share a story about vegetables or cooking you’ll likely be inundated with ads for pots and pans, cookbooks, and barbecue equipment. Or, search a topic like “Ukraine” or “Proud Boys” and just wait for the Russians to surreptitiously arrive.

Filter Bubble medium.com

Unfortunately, this bombardment may be convenient, but also distorts reality and intellectually isolates. Filter bubbles also divide us geographically: Search a word from a laptop in New York, and then the same word from a laptop in Baton Rouge, and results will be markedly different. Another bubble phenomenon leads to cyber-balkanization or the clustering of sub-groups of like-minded people who spurn other viewpoints and reinforce one another’s views. Such bubbles have always existed — in the form of organized religions, cults, gangs, and movements — but digitization has sped up their creation and has resulted in techniques to identify and tap into groups of people, based on common psychological and other traits. This is achieved by mining great gobs of personal data from users without their permission.

This approach was honed into weaponry and in 2018 British journalist Carole Cadwalladr exposed how the outcome of the Brexit referendum (and the 2016 U.S. election) was engineered using bubbles through Facebook. The social media giant handed over tens of millions of user profiles to Cambridge Analytica (now defunct) which developed a psychometric targeting tool and found people deemed to be “persuadable” based on what they had clicked and disclosed on sites or Facebook pages about themselves. Facebook then accepted ads from the “Vote Leave” Brexit side (and the Trump side) that anonymously spread disinformation, smears, inaccuracies, and fear, in the form of both ads and “news” content pushed into user feeds. Cambridge Analytica was owned by Donald Trump donor Robert Mercer and advised by Trump guru Steve Bannon.

Being stalked online by your own identity is bizarre, and obviously disastrous. Fortunately, people can erase their fingerprints or “cookies” and can burst through the filter bubble by seeking alternative ideas, using multiple sources to corroborate information, spurning sites that use “cookies”, and deleting their own search history.

Yoda meme imgflip.com

But governments should play more of a role in protecting online privacy than they currently do. Europe and California are leading the way, but too many people remain oblivious to the hazards, or that they should self-police. Fortunately, Google (Alphabet) just announced on March 3 that next year it will stop using or investing in tracking technologies that help it sell ads based on individuals’ browsing across multiple websites. This is in response to privacy violations and is cynically designed to pre-empt new privacy constraints that critics hope will be imposed on Big Tech companies in the United States and other jurisdictions next year.

Until then, we are what we click and power continues to shift to faceless forces that bubble-wrap us into following immutable, or dangerous, thought grooves. The invention of cookies and algorithms has turned the Internet’s promise of connectivity on its head and has segregated and exploited more and more of us to the detriment of society and democracy. Hopefully, it’s not too late to reverse the situation but only if governments regulate to protect everyone’s privacy soon.

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