By PLS
Up to now I’ve liked the Google news page: a huge compendium of the latest takes on the big news stories of the day in most areas of human endeavor or folly. Four or five major headlines reproduced under each topic. Instant access to up to 1000 or more items on that subject in chronological order. Easy navigation.
What more could a news freak want? I was a happy consumer.
I am not anymore. Why? Here is found when I checked on the news this afternoon:
“Recommended for myname@ myinternetaddress.” Not that exactly, of course. The real thing. And underneath was a news story.
Message to Google: stop collecting and storing the information that allows you to think you can pick the topic I most want to know about so you can hit me in the eye with it when I open the Google news page.
You Aren’t My Friend
Am I supposed to feel grateful? I am not. Nor am I jumping up and down with joy over your invitation to customize or personalize this page.
In the first place, I don’t want to “customize” a perfectly adequate news page, because what’s perfect for my interests now may not serve my interests a few months from now—and I don’t want to waste time on frivolous serial customizing. Secondly, I’m not interested in “personalizing” my interface with you. I don’t want a personal relationship with Google or Yahoo or any other such service.
So don’t address me by name. We aren’t friends. We aren’t acquaintances. Pseudo-familiarity is not going to make me more likely to purchase any service you may offer or buy through any ads that may eventually be shot at me. (I feel the same way about junk mail that uses my name in some sales pitch. Rip! Into the circular file.)
Stop the Surveillance
Which reminds me, Google: don't use the info you have on me to shoot ads at me. I don’t care if you register each hit I make purely anonymously so you can tabulate what’s popular. I don’t care if you send a certain ad along with everyone's hit on a certain topic. I absolutely think there ought to be a law against tailoring ads directly to me because that requires that you keep information about what I read and make it available to third parties.
I know you are trying to make money out of the blogosphere, and I sympathize, up to a point, but I do not want you or NSA or anyone else keeping track of what I read. It’s called spying—and there is nothing about my activities or life that would justify the clandestine collection and archiving of information about me and my preferences.
Congress: there oughta be a law to prevent this collection of info—and the misuse of cookies should be involved in that law. Hint: the proper use of cookies should require transparency. I mean a clear simple query in a prominent place on all home pages. May we? May we not?
The Pseudo Communication Opportunity
Meanwhile, I decided to see if I could communicate with Google to have this unwanted unrequested service removed. After clicking through various screens (the crammed small print kind) saying nothing particularly comforting about privacy (more need for legislation), I found an invitation to communicate. So I sent an email to Google asking that this intrusive “personalizing” be stopped.
When I got back to the computer a few hours later, I decided to check on the latest news (as usual). I found a message that gratified me at first: something to the effect that Google had got my message and would reply, if needed.
That impressed me. It was fast. Even if it was an automatic-type reply, it was something.
Then my eye fell on the news. Guess what. There it was: “Recommended for......”
GOOGLE: PLEASE REMOVE ME FROM THIS SERVICE NOW!!!!!!!!!! Does anyone out there have any suggestions?
Segmentation, Isolation and Control
I have some broader thoughts about excessive personalizing. There’s something called market segmentation, which attempts to aim communications at narrow audiences that will be really ripe for particular kinds of advertising. So keeping track of what I read (or buy) via the internet, could make for highly personalized advertising. A market of one. The ultimate segmentation. For advertisers, then, the perfect electronic customer lives in a cocoon of individual preferences, separate from everyone else, an encapsulated robotic buying machine. Families who put a separate television set in every room of the house encourage this kind of behavior. Instead of finding programs to share, the already small nuclear family splits up into isolated communications/sales targets with little in common.
Political candidates play the segmentation game, too. The ads they run in New Mexico may be different from the ads they run in New York. The ads may even be contradictory (sometimes campaign managers get caught at this). Even candidates who talk so engagingly about bringing us together don’t do that when they campaign. They segment us, tell each of us only what they think we want to hear and force us further and further apart. It’s called divide and conquer.
The electronic world is often hailed as a powerful new way of empowering people politically and allowing them to create vast potent networks for effective social action. We’ve seen some examples of this. But I’m afraid that much of the activity on the web has the opposite effect. It encourages isolation, passivity, mere solipsism.
Bottom Line
Tailoring the news just for me ensures that I will be fed only what I already know and care about. It confirms me in my currently apparent prejudices. But that's far from my goal in life, and what I like about the Internet is that it gives me amazingly easy access to the world.
Don't try to narrow down my universe, Google.