The Filter Bubble Quotes

“Personalization is based on a bargain. In exchange for the service of filtering, you hand large companies an enormous amount of data about your daily life--much of which you might not trust your friends with.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You

“A world constructed from the familiar is the world in which there's nothing to learn.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You

“Your computer monitor is a kind a one-way mirror, reflecting your own interests while algorithmic observers watch what you click.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You

“The filter bubble tends to dramatically amplify confirmation bias—in a way, it’s designed to. Consuming information that conforms to our ideas of the world is easy and pleasurable; consuming information that challenges us to think in new ways or question our assumptions is frustrating and difficult. This is why partisans of one political stripe tend not to consume the media of another. As a result, an information environment built on click signals will favor content that supports our existing notions about the world over content that challenges them.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble

“If you’re not paying for something, you’re not the customer; you’re the product being sold. —Andrew Lewis, under the alias Blue_beetle, on the Web site MetaFilter”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble

“Google is great at helping us find what we know we want, but not at finding what we don't know we want.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You

“A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa. —Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble

“What was once an anonymous medium where anyone could be anyone—where, in the words of the famous New Yorker cartoon, nobody knows you’re a dog—is now a tool for soliciting and analyzing our personal data. According to one Wall Street Journal study, the top fifty Internet sites, from CNN to Yahoo to MSN, install an average of 64 data-laden cookies and personal tracking beacons each. Search for a word like “depression” on Dictionary.com, and the site installs up to 223 tracking cookies and beacons on your computer so that other Web sites can target you with antidepressants. Share an article about cooking on ABC News, and you may be chased around the Web by ads for Teflon-coated pots. Open—even for an instant—a page listing signs that your spouse may be cheating and prepare to be haunted with DNA paternity-test ads. The new Internet doesn’t just know you’re a dog; it knows your breed and wants to sell you a bowl of premium kibble.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble

“More voices means less trust in any given voice.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You

“1973 Fair Information Practices:

- You should know who has your personal data, what data they have, and how it is used.
- You should be able to prevent information collected about you for one purpose from being used for others.
- You should be able to correct inaccurate information about you.
- Your data should be secure.

..while it's illegal to use Brad Pitt's image to sell a watch without his permission, Facebook is free to use your name to sell one to your friends.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You

“The Google self and the Facebook self, in other words, are pretty different people. There's a big difference between "you are what you click" and "you are what you share.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You

“The algorithms that orchestrate our ads are starting to orchestrate our lives.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You

“The most serious political problem posed by filter bubbles is that they make it increasingly difficult to have a public argument.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You

“One of the best ways to understand how filters shape our individual experience is to think in terms of our information diet. As sociologist danah boyd said in a speech at the 2009 Web 2.0 Expo: Our bodies are programmed to consume fat and sugars because they’re rare in nature.... In the same way, we’re biologically programmed to be attentive to things that stimulate: content that is gross, violent, or sexual and that gossip which is humiliating, embarrassing, or offensive. If we’re not careful, we’re going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesity. We’ll find ourselves consuming content that is least beneficial for ourselves or society as a whole.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble

“Our brains tread a tightrope between learning too much from the past and incorporating too much new information from the present. The ability to walk this line – to adjust to the demands of different environments and modalities – is one of human cognition's most astonishing traits. Artificial intelligence has yet to come anywhere close.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You

“In a personalized world, important but complex or unpleasant issues are less likely to come to our attention at all.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You

“Personalization filters serve a kind of invisible autopropaganda, indoctrinating us with our own ideas, amplifying our desire for things that are familiar in leaving us oblivious to the dangers lurking in the dark territory of the unknown.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You

“But what’s troubling about this shift toward personalization is that it’s largely invisible to users and, as a result, out of our control. We are not even aware that we’re seeing increasingly divergent images of the Internet. The Internet may know who we are, but we don’t know who it thinks we are or how it’s using that information. Technology designed to give us more control over our lives is actually taking control away.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble

“In a provocative article in Wired, editor-in-chief Chris Anderson argued that huge databases render scientific theory itself obsolete. Why spend time formulating human-language hypotheses, after all, when you can quickly analyze trillions of bits of data and find the clusters and correlations? He quotes Peter Norvig, Google’s research director: “All models are wrong, and increasingly you can succeed without them.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble

“The personalized environment is very good at answering the questions we have but not at suggesting questions or problems that are out of our sight altogether. It brings to mind the famous Pablo Picasso quotation: “Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble

“Partisans are more likely to consume news sources that confirm their ideological beliefs. People with more education are more likely to follow political news. Therefore, people with more education can actually become mis-educated.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble

“When you read books on your Kindle, the data about which phrases you highlight, which pages you turn, and whether you read straight through or skip around are all fed back into Amazon’s servers and can be used to indicate what books you might like next. When you log in after a day reading Kindle e-books at the beach, Amazon is able to subtly customize its site to appeal to what you’ve read: If you’ve spent a lot of time with the latest James Patterson, but only glanced at that new diet guide, you might see more commercial thrillers and fewer health books.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble

“Without sitting down next to a friend, it’s hard to tell how the version of Google or Yahoo News that you’re seeing differs from anyone else’s. But because the filter bubble distorts our perception of what’s important, true, and real, it’s critically important to render it visible.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble

“Try to throw a rock through a virtual storefront, and you just get an error.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding from You

“Personalized filters play to the most compulsive parts of you, creating "compulsive media" to get you to click things more.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You

“It's a civic virtue to be exposed to things that appear to be outside your interest. In a complex world, almost everything affects you – that closes the loop on pecuniary self-interest. Customers are always right, but people aren't.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You

“Eric Schmidt likes to point out that if you recorded all human communication from the dawn of time to 2003, it takes up about five billion gigabytes of storage space. Now were creating that much data every two days”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You

“Democracy requires citizens to see things from one another's point of view, but instead were more and more enclosed in our own bubbles. Democracy requires a reliance on shared facts; instead were being offered parallel but separate universes.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You

“Because of the economies of scale in data, the cloud giants are increasingly powerful. And because they’re so susceptible to regulation, these companies have a vested interest in keeping government entities happy. When the Justice Department requested billions of search records from AOL, Yahoo, and MSN in 2006, the three companies quickly complied. (Google, to its credit, opted to fight the request.) Stephen Arnold, an IT expert who worked at consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, says that Google at one point housed three officers of “an unnamed intelligence agency” at its headquarters in Mountain View. And Google and the CIA have invested together in a firm called Recorded Future, which focuses on using data connections to predict future real-world events.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble

“As soon as the hijackers’ names had been publicly released, Acxiom had searched its massive data banks, which take up five acres in tiny Conway, Arkansas. And it had found some very interesting data on the perpetrators of the attacks. In fact, it turned out, Acxiom knew more about eleven of the nineteen hijackers than the entire U.S. government did—including their past and current addresses and the names of their housemates. We may never know what was in the files Acxiom gave the government (though one of the executives told a reporter that Acxiom’s information had led to deportations and indictments). But here’s what Acxiom knows about 96 percent of American households and half a billion people worldwide: the names of their family members, their current and past addresses, how often they pay their credit card bills whether they own a dog or a cat (and what breed it is), whether they are right-handed or left-handed, what kinds of medication they use (based on pharmacy records) … the list of data points is about 1,500 items long.”
― Eli Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet is Hiding From You