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As an online publishing professional, I'm always on the lookout for sensible ways to serve ads contextually. I don't want to waste people's time. I don't want to show them stuff they don't want to buy. I want to make sure my sponsors and advertisers get good, solid clickthrough from qualified potential customers. On a technical level, of course, I'm familiar with many strategies for contextual ad-service and work with them every day. So I'm not freaked out by the concept, or with many of its functional expressions. Still ... there have gotta be limits on how creepily-perspicacious these systems are allowed to become. And I'm sorry, but -- as of just now -- Google's gmail is overstepping. I just posted a comment to a blog entry over on Rissa's blog at www.world2worlds.com. And because I'm subscribed to receive email when comments appear on that blog, I immediately got an email pingback about my own comment. Without getting into the thread itself, my comment included the paragraph: "This is worrisome when you consider some of the politico-ideological threads at play in virtual reality today, like 'transhumanism,' which may seem in certain lights (and in certain companies) benign, but connect via short links to anarcho-capitalist-elitist, radical libertarian and ultimately fascist root-thought." So I see the ping show up in my gmail inbox, and then I see the one-line page-top ad (just above the inbox) shift to show the following: Marxist T-Shirts - www.RadicalJack.com - Lenin, Che, Paris 68, Trotsky Socialist T-Shirts for activists ... thus demonstrating that gmail is scanning my email bodies for keywords pertaining to (among other things) terminology common to Marxist and post-Marxist rhetoric (I suspect the trigger phrase here was 'anarcho-capitalist,' with 'fascist' also a contender), inferring that I have Marxist leanings (as it happens, not true -- but perhaps more true than pegging me as a right-winger), and showing me ads for appropriate sportswear. I'm sorry, but that's MAJOR creepy. It's one thing to assume I'm a PHP programmer looking for developer tools if I'm reading posts on a PHP developer tools blog. It's another to infer my politics by scanning my email. That's exactly where everybody fears this stuff is going -- towards a slippery slope where eventually, nothing is private and a global system is quietly making and vending background inferences about your politics, credit-worthiness, HIV status, etc. That, in turn, is one short step removed from insurance refusals, putting people on watch-lists, and the tramp of jackboots. And the creepiest thing is that it took something obvious, like this, to clue me in. It's not like I don't know how gmail works. It's not like the signup didn't include disclaimers and advisories (at least I assume it did - I don't really remember). It's not like I don't understand the tech or its implications. After all, this is, in a sense, what I _do_. But -- la-dee-da -- for some reason, the fact that okay -- a lot of my correspondence is about Second Life, so gmail frequently shows me SL-related advertising ... THAT didn't creep me out. That almost felt like a "service." Now the same tech has me pegged as a closet Marxist. BIG eye-opener! I'd love comments on this. Does anyone else find this as stone-down rock-the-world creepy as I do? I'm ready to rip this thing out and become one of those people who puts his PGP public key in his sig. Google: Cut that out!
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It's one thing to assume I'm a PHP programmer looking for developer tools if I'm reading posts on a PHP developer tools blog. It's another to infer my politics by scanning my email. That's exactly where everybody fears this stuff is going -- towards a slippery slope where eventually, nothing is private and a global system is quietly making and vending background inferences about your politics, credit-worthiness, HIV status, etc. That, in turn, is one short step removed from insurance refusals, putting people on watch-lists, and the tramp of jackboots. [/QUOTE]
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the perceived anonymity of the internetz is mythical at best.
Fortunately being unimportant is far too easily achieved even by those who decline to march in time with the sheeple; unfortunately such people are rather easily marginalized as soon as they begin to become important enough to be heard.
Since propaganda is a universal tool of statecraft, the various and sundry governments of the myriad states whose citizenry have access to the internet exercise varying degrees of control over what gets through to their citizens.
http://shanghaiist.com/2008/03/15/youtube_gfwed_a.php
Controlling what the population sees, hears, and thinks about is easy for the authorities which license browsers, search engines, etc.
We're often quite grateful (as the OP observed) for the "service" of weeding out the millions of sites in foreign languages, etc.
SPAM, viruses, etc, clog up the information superhighway and make the population fearful; I seriously wonder whether such things really serve the interests of the sellers of security software, anarchists, or the governments and licensing authorities?
Want to fly below the radar? Use IE instead of Umbutu, establish and maintain a regular pattern of use, be circumspect in all you do online, to avoid triggering keywords, don't say much, don't discuss controversial subjects, adopt a bland and expressionless stance on the global stage and essentially self censor --- may as well unplug the thing.
I discovered that there are countries actively blocking certain content when I sent the following link to a friend and was informed that she couldn't see it because where she lives it's illegal to publicize anything with Hitler in it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gy9hQDT6fhI
OR.... Maybe I'm just paranoid after all?
**puts on tinfoil hat**