Google announced yesterday that it assigned various of its business interests to specific companies under the Google umbrella and calling it Alphabet. While that may be good for their business, the traditional Google service -- the search engine -- is still the information parasite it has been.
Among other things, the information Google collects from users is used to facilitate confirmation bias, or as Emma Reynolds calls it, "filter bubble.” See How Google distorts your view of the world. Excerpt:
MANY charges have been levelled at Google. It steals your information, violates copyright, allows access to dangerous and illegal material and prioritises its own sites while crushing any competition.
But perhaps the most troubling accusation about the search giant is that it distorts our view of the world, giving us a fatally flawed idea of what is going on around us.
This problem is known as the “filter bubble”: as Google learns from your searches and makes its results increasingly personalised and tailored to you, you stop seeing anything else.
On the one hand, that helps you to get exactly the results you are looking for, but on the downside, you stop encountering the ways other people see and interact with the world.
It gets worse.
Another scary thought is that Google, a multibillion-dollar corporation after all, is free to manipulate results based on its own rating of different websites.
Much worse. See Google’s Search Algorithm Could Steal the Presidency. In short:
In other words: Google’s ranking algorithm for search results could accidentally steal the presidency. “We estimate, based on win margins in national elections around the world,” says Robert Epstein, a psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology and one of the study’s authors, “that Google could determine the outcome of upwards of 25 percent of all national elections.”
That word "accidentally" should probably be replaced with "intentionally."
Sigh. I miss the good old days when we feared that Microsoft was gonna eat the world.
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