A student’s perception about Google & peeping inside “The Filter Bubble” :
In 2013, the Edge magazine interviewed several people known for their intellectual contributions, asking them this question: “What should we be worried about?” Scientist and researcher W. Daniel Hillis highlighted that we should worry about search engines becoming the arbiters of truth.”
The objective of this write-up is to question the actual privacy of this contemporary society that is hooked on to their computers or more precisely to the internet , the world wide web which of course remains incomplete without the term “Google”. Curious about what happened the same day probably a 100 years ago ? Forgot about some important equation ? Lost your way back home ? Want to get detailed weather updates ? . There’s a single answer to all such questions — “ Just type it on Google and let Google find it out for you “- and by doing so we’re unknowingly increasing the data that Google has on our online behaviour . What’s the most used object in today’s life ? Certainly our Cell-phones, most of which are working on Android , and who owns Android ? yes its Google. Think about the apps we use most which are logged in through our Google account, think about our phone’s GPS linked to “Google maps”, every place we go, Google knows first; all our curiosities are mapped to Google even before they are known by the people close to us .Google knows when you wake up in the morning, Google knows your place of work, Google knows the bus you generally take to your workplace. Google knows all. Google tracks all. But critics are sceptical of the idea to allow a private company to know so much about us.
Originally known as BackRub. Google is a search engine that started development in 1996 by Sergey Brin and Larry Page as a research project at Stanford University to find files on the Internet. Google is a search engine, but predominantly we may term Google as an advertising company, which makes us sceptical about its data storage and distribution process. After all the organization makes millions and millions of dollars out of advertisement revenues. In order to keep its “free” services going, Google stresses more on its advertisement policies and with the data it already possesses Google might just be a dangerous tech-giant.
The term filter bubble was coined by internet activist Eli Pariser in his book, “The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You” (2011).
Pariser relates a case in which a user searches for “BP” on Google and gets investment news regarding British Petroleum as the search result, while another user receives details on the Deepwater Horizon oil spill for the same keyword. These two search results are noticeably different, and could affect the searchers’ impression of the news surrounding the British Petroleum company. According to Pariser, this bubble impact could have adverse effects for social discourse. However, others say the impact is negligible.
A filter bubble is the intellectual isolation that can occur when websites make use of algorithms to selectively assume the information a user would want to see, and then give information to the user according to this assumption. Websites make these assumptions based on the information related to the user, such as former click behavior, browsing history, search history
and location. For that reason, the websites are more likely to present only information that will bide by the user’s past activity. A filter bubble, therefore, can cause users to get significantly less contact with contradicting viewpoints, causing the user to become intellectually isolated. Personalized search results from Google and personalized news stream from Facebook are two perfect examples of this phenomenon.
In a TED talks event, Eli has talked about the numerous examples of information organization and personalization. There is an invisible shift in how information is flowing and Eli Pariser wants us to be aware of it. The web now adapts depending on the specific user. Eli first noticed this automatic filtering in his own Facebook news feed. He is politically progressive and noticed that he was starting to see less and less of the conservative links posted by his Facebook friends. Facebook had worked out that Eli had been clicking more liberal links than conservative links and hid them. This invisible, algorithmic editing is used by nearly all major sources of news and information. Google now uses 57 different signals to determine your search results. Ranging from your geographic location to your age and ethnicity. Yahoo News and Huffington Post have also begun to personalize their information. The information I get is no longer the information you get.
In the world of Information Technology, professionals could use the term “echo chamber” in a number of ways. One common use of the term in IT would relate to software development processes or other technology development processes where free play of ideas is inhibited, and as a result, the best outcomes are prevented. Someone might talk about a software development project occurring in an echo chamber, where they feel programmers and engineers are not allowed to explore ideas that might lead to better features or functionality.
The next most alarming thing is the Google Effect. Wikipedia describes The Google effect, also called digital amnesia, as the tendency to forget information that can be found readily online by using Internet search engines such as Google. According to the first study about the Google effect people are less likely to remember certain details they believe will be accessible online.
There is a sea change brought about by the “Internet effect,” if it may be called so. Researchers, led by psychologist Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University, have studied this paradigm shift in memory, called the “Google effect,” and
indicated that people have a poor recall of knowledge from their memory if they knew where that knowledge could easily be found on the Internet, but at the same time they are more adept at remembering information on how to get access to it on the Net through links, hyperlinks, etc. Internet search engines are making people ‘lose their memory,’ as information could easily be retrieved from the Internet.
