theatlantic: A Guide to the Digital Advertising Industry That’s Watching Your Every Click We’re at the start of a revolution in the ways marketers and media intrude in — and shape — our lives. Every day, most if not all Americans who use the internet, along with hundreds of millions of other users from all over the planet, are being quietly peeked at, poked, analyzed and tagged as they move through the online world. Governments undoubtedly conduct a good deal of snooping, more in some parts of the world than in others. In North America, Europe, and many other places, companies that work for marketers have taken the lead in secretly slicing and dicing the actions and backgrounds of huge populations on a virtually minute-by-minute basis. Their goal is to find out how to activate individuals’ buying impulses so they can sell us stuff more efficiently than ever before. But their work has broader social and cultural consequences as well. It is destroying traditional publishing ethics by forcing media outlets to adapt their editorial content to advertisers’ public-relations needs and slice-and-dice demands. And it is performing a highly controversial form of social profiling and discrimination by customizing our media content on the basis of marketing reputations we don’t even know we have. Read more. [Image: Based on a Library of Congress photo in the public domain] An excerpt from University of Pennsylvania professor Joseph Turow’s new book, The Daily You, which investigates the industry that’s trafficking in the data you generate every day online. I love DuckDuckGo’s related summary, too.

theatlantic:

A Guide to the Digital Advertising Industry That’s Watching Your Every Click

We’re at the start of a revolution in the ways marketers and media intrude in — and shape — our lives. Every day, most if not all Americans who use the internet, along with hundreds of millions of other users from all over the planet, are being quietly peeked at, poked, analyzed and tagged as they move through the online world. Governments undoubtedly conduct a good deal of snooping, more in some parts of the world than in others.

In North America, Europe, and many other places, companies that work for marketers have taken the lead in secretly slicing and dicing the actions and backgrounds of huge populations on a virtually minute-by-minute basis. Their goal is to find out how to activate individuals’ buying impulses so they can sell us stuff more efficiently than ever before. But their work has broader social and cultural consequences as well. It is destroying traditional publishing ethics by forcing media outlets to adapt their editorial content to advertisers’ public-relations needs and slice-and-dice demands. And it is performing a highly controversial form of social profiling and discrimination by customizing our media content on the basis of marketing reputations we don’t even know we have. Read more.

[Image: Based on a Library of Congress photo in the public domain]

An excerpt from University of Pennsylvania professor Joseph Turow’s new book, The Daily You, which investigates the industry that’s trafficking in the data you generate every day online.

I love DuckDuckGo’s related summary, too.

“

Ask the Siri, the new iPhone 4 assistant, where to get an abortion, and, if you happen to be in Washington, D.C., she won’t direct you to the Planned Parenthood on 16th St, NW. Instead, she’ll suggest you pay a visit to the 1st Choice Women’s Health Center, an anti-abortion Crisis Pregnancy Center (CPC) in Landsdowne, Virginia, or Human Life Services, a CPC in York, Pennsylvania. Ask Google the same question, and you’ll get ads for no less than 7 metro-area abortion clinics, 2 CPCs and a nationwide abortion referral service.


Ask in New York City, and Siri will tell you: ‘I didn’t find any abortion clinics.’

”

10 things the iPhone Siri will help you get instead of an abortion | The Raw Story (via interweber)

If true, this is extremely important. Not just because of the subject matter but because its important to understand that our access to news and INFORMATION may increasingly be funneled through large companies like Apple, Facebook, Google and Amazon, who have hidden agendas, policies or biases we don’t know about. 

(via jennydeluxe)

“One interesting place this comes up is at Netflix — the basic math behind the Netflix code tends to be conservative. Netflix uses an algorithm called Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE, to geeks), which basically calculates the “distance” between different movies. The problem with RMSE is that while it’s very good at predicting what movies you’ll like — generally it’s under one star off — it’s conservative. It would rather be right and show you a movie that you’ll rate a four, than show you a movie that has a 50% chance of being a five and a 50% chance of being a one. Human curators are often more likely to take these kinds of risks.
…
In some ways, I think that’s the primary purpose of an editor — to extend the horizon of what people are interested in and what people know. Giving people what they think they want is easy, but it’s also not very satisfying: the same stuff, over and over again. Great editors are like great matchmakers: they introduce people to whole new ways of thinking, and they fall in love.”

Eli Pariser. I’m currently fascinated by this topic and the startups attacking the related problems (percolate, summify, knowaboutit, etc.) and I can’t wait to read Pariser’s book.

The Filter Bubble: How the Web Gives Us What We Want, and That’s Not a Good Thing