Forum - an act in two internet networks

Ninety-nine percent of us live on the wrong side of a one-way mirror

Imagine an Internet where a missing hand edits the entire user experience in its entirety, a network where a third party dictates the news and the products and prices you will see, and even the people you will meet. A world where it seems to you that you decide, but in practice the options before you are so limited and distilled that the control you have is nothing but an illusion.

Things are not much different today. The technology allows Google, Facebook and other parties to collect information about us and use it to adapt the browsing experience to our taste, our habits and our income level. The Internet of the rich has therefore become a completely different place from the Internet of the poor. Most of us unknowingly became actors in the dramatic story unfolding about the two networks. On the Internet there is mine and there is yours, there is theirs and there is ours.

And this is how it works: advertising today drives almost the entire Internet industry by revenue volume. Silicon Valley excels at founding and funding companies that give away apps for free and then collect information about their users and sell it. Throughout most of the short history of the Internet, the collection of information was primarily for the purpose of classic product marketing. For example, advertisers will probably want to expose me to Nike shoes and my wife to Manolo Blahnik shoes. But the collection of information is progressing by leaps and bounds beyond mere advertising, and is beginning to allow insurance companies, health services and other companies to profit from analyzing your highly detailed personal "big data" without your knowledge. Based on this analysis, those companies make decisions about you, including the decision whether it is worth marketing to you at all.

As a result 99% of us live on the wrong side of a one-way mirror, through which the remaining percentage routes our internet experience. Some praise this trend and call it "personalization", an innocent and endearing combination of words that gives the impression that perhaps the advertisements we see will appear in our favorite colors. But this is a trend that goes deeper and has much more consequences.

For example, according to federal regulations it is forbidden to discriminate in the pricing of credit allocation based on certain personal characteristics. However, as Natasha Singer recently reported in the "New York Times", technological developments in online and offline data mining make it possible to uphold the law in its word but not in its spirit: companies can simply avoid offering credit to less attractive populations altogether. If you live in the wrong digital neighborhood, you will never receive offers from the major credit companies and you will not know that they can grant you loans that may support your personal or professional priorities.

In the last ten years, internet trading sites have started to change the prices according to your browsing habits and personal characteristics. What is your geographic location and what is your purchase history? How did you get to the trading site? What hours of the day do you visit it? A fairly extensive literature has already grown on the ethical and legal aspects of pricing optimization, and on its economic benefits. And this field is developing fast: in September 2012, Google registered a patent for technology that allows companies to dynamically price electronic content. The company can, for example, increase the basic price of an e-book if it is found that the chances of buying this particular item are higher than the average chance. Alternatively, it can lower the price if the data about you shows that the chances of you purchasing the product are lower. And you won't even know that you paid more than your friends for the exact same product.

This masking also prevails in political life in the digital world. As Eli Friser [political activist and activist on Internet issues - the editors] pointed out, the Internet shows us "what the Web thinks we want to see." We therefore receive content that matches the hidden profiles they have prepared for us based on our daily online activities. This hidden editing helps determine our political views through "echo chambers" that confirm the opinion we have established instead of challenging it. As the jurist Cass Sunstein of Harvard University wrote: Liberals and conservatives who raise issues for public discussion only with those who belong to their political faction become more and more confident and extreme in their views.

The compartmentalization and separation are increasing. The good side of personalization therefore also has a dark side.

About the author

Michael Fertik is the founder and CEO of Reputation.com, an online reputation management company. The company is a partner in the Council for the Future of the Internet of the World Economic Forum.