You've Been Profiled

If you do much of anything online these days, you can count on being profiled by some high-tech algorithm written by Google, Facebook, Amazon, Yahoo, etc. An algorithm—by the dictionary's definition—is “a process or set of rules to be followed in calculation or other problem-solving operations by a computer.” Thus an algorithm is not monitored by humans; it is set up and then it tirelessly collects its information via machine.

Online algorithms appeal to advertisers and authorities, because they automatically and unerringly categorize and compartmentalize people's behaviors, choices, and even beliefs. When Google or Facebook tracks your online choices and surfing behavior, you become profiled. You become compartmentalized into categories and boxes that they've defined. You've become labeled.

This information primarily is used for targeting advertisements at you. If you are an aging baby boomer, for example, why send you ads for rap music or the hottest bungee jumping spots? Wouldn't an ad for the latest pharmaceutical pill for the body's aging infirmities be more appropriate? Profiling can save advertisers from funding such scattershot ads, instead allowing them to focus on receptive audiences. And it can save the consumer from having to push past many irrelevant ads.

So many people are just fine with online profiling; it does not waste their time and screen space with ads they don't want. What many of these folks do not realize, however, is that they've bargained away some of their privacy for convenience. That may seem to be a fair trade to them, but many of them do not realize the depth of the profiling being done on them. They don't realize just how detailed a picture of their private lives are now sitting in some data bank, available to all who pay a small fee for access.

The profiling information gained by these algorithms even allows the Google, Facebook, and Amazon data collectors to predict what things you may want to buy tomorrow. Did you do a search on baby clothes? You will soon be receiving ads for all kinds of things that prospective parents might be looking for. Do a search on marijuana? Maybe the feds have added you to a data base that keeps an eye on possible pot smokers. This may sound a little paranoid, but the personal details willingly and foolishly posted on people's Facebook accounts expose them to the world and can be used against them at some future time.

Possibly the most insidious use of online profiling is the way in which people's points of view adds to our culture's polarization. The algorithms quickly categorize you into distinct and isolated boxes of belief patterns; then you get fed only those ideas and expressions that conform to your predispositions. You get fed things you already know—confirming your existing beliefs and biases. Your feelings and beliefs can then become confirmed and certain in your mind. Your mind is encouraged to close around this isolated pocket of ideas. Your thinking increasingly avoids any alternatives. You become encased in a bubble of narrow thinking that just reinforces your point of view. Nothing challenges your thinking. Polarization grows.

Profiling goes against the value we may achieve from communication and the opening our mind to alternative concepts and ideas. It feeds insular thinking and suspicion of the other. Our society badly needs critical thinking, openness to alternative ideas, and dialog with other viewpoints. Online profiling essentially does just the opposite.