Eli Pariser: Beware online "filter bubbles"

http://www.ted.com As web companies strive to tailor their services (including news and search results) to our personal tastes, there's a dangerous unintended consequence: We get trapped in a "filter bubble" and don't get exposed to information that could challenge or broaden our worldview. Eli Pariser argues powerfully that this will ultimately prove to be bad for us and bad for democracy.
Read our community Q&A with Eli (featuring 10 ways to turn off the filter bubble): http://on.ted.com/PariserQA

• Category

  Science & Technology

[KayakDiverDown]

So many people are becoming extremists. Extreme Left, Extreme Right, Extreme This, Extreme That .. ... Filtering their information pipeline can only be a bad thing in the long run that will divide society even further.

[lrn2swimlrn2swim]

I'm in a YouTube bubble right now. Its fucking awful. I only get videos recommended to me from whom Im subscribed too, the videos on the right when viewing these videos are just more videos from the same channel or videos from other channels I'm subscribed to. There's nothing fresh ever thrown my way anymore, its only stuff Ive viewed already or the stuff of those Im subscribed too. WTF DO I DO?

[boomtao]

Does anyone know if Ixquick might be the solution? I thought Ixquick was the most "private" (in the sense of anonymous) search engine.

[Bommer129]

Although he brings up some good points and overall I feel that the video insight., I am disappointed in the fact that he used two different search engines to compare results. He used Google and Bing yet falsely passed them both off as Google with possibly photoshop..Just do a comparison search yourself and you will see the difference. I personally immediately noticed this difference since I worked at booth for Microsoft's Bing vs. Google Challenge.

[Uniqloud]

One way out of the bubble is to have someone else help you with your online research!

[Toby Lael]

We need new technology to solve the problems that this technology has created.

[Dentharg]

Hmm.. Interesting observation. 

[pr3datux]

Yeah I know that but it was advice to that concrete problem of recommended videos. Read lrn2swimlrn2swim post again. Now if you are logged in yt you don't even have main page. And I noticed that after logging out and deleting cookies I will get recommend videos related to that what I was actually watching at the moment. Don't know if then google is still giving me filtered by my preferences videos but I'm getting videos not only related to subscribed channels.

[Dentharg]

See the movie again, 2:20. Google's looking at 57 signals that can help determine YOU; even if you're logged out.

[pr3datux]

better log out and clean cookies