Not that it will particularly help me- Facebook and Google are all-knowing, all-seeing. Facebook is installed on my phone, and my Internet browser of choice is Chrome, so if its anonymity I want, I'm going about it all wrong.
But it is anonymity that I want. "The Filter Bubble" introduced no surprising news to me- I've known for a while that Google tracks your searches and clicks to give you what it thinks you want to see, and that Facebook uses your information to improve ad services. I get it, too- personalization of the web is extremely profitable, and that's what matters.
Its just so weird to me.
The first time I encountered personalization was on Facebook- it was around 2009 that I had noticed the ads on the social media site were becoming strangely tailored. Adverts for new flutes and concert tickets started replacing those insufferable bar-ads that incorporated a simple game into their ploy to get you to click. A social media service using the data you inputed to their website to sell adspace seemed cheap and kind of exploitative to me, but it wasn't too much for me to stop using Facebook. It was just an improved method of turning users into buyers.
It was when I found out that this personalization was also happening to my news that I grew concerned. I appreciated the internet as a news source because it has a limitless amount of information from an equally limitless amount of sources- you can easily find seven different stories on the same event. This information was difficult to get through, however, so I employed the use of Google news to get through it for me. The fact that Google decides what news articles to show you based on past history just seems fundamentally wrong- reading news from sources that you are given because it is known that you agree with these sources will result in recursive, unproductive thinking. There is no growth in reading what you know you like.
