Measuring the “Filter Bubble”: How Google is influencing what you click

I get that an entity could be more interested in uncovering facts about one party than another but in this particular case, the fact was that the Democratic Party was acting "unethically" in some people's eyes. If they hadn't been then it wouldn't have "influenced" people's opinions.

Another way to look at it: that entity didn't annotate the emails, the content of the emails was enough to anger people.

I'm not try to fork this into a flame war, I'm genuinely interested in what other users of this site think, particularly those who think differently than I do.

The cost however is discovery, which is to say things you might be interested in but didn't know exist. To enhance discovery you often need a wide band curator that can surface "likely" interesting things without destroying the experience of always finding what you want.

In the world of real goods these sorts of discovery curators are enthusiast publications which might talk about the new things coming down the road, or a restaurant critic that is trying the new restaurants.

Real human search and discovery is a pretty personal thing. And when it goes on all inside your head/environment its pretty acceptable too. People putting their favorite cookbooks in a more prominent place, wearing specific fashions that they like while only really shopping at clothing stores that support that fashion look.

When that information is at a third party, and dissectable by tools, then it gets creepy.

Someone who doesn't "know you"[1] but typically wants to sell you something, can find you and market to you, to help you "discover" something new on their schedule instead of on your schedule. When that knowledge about what you like and don't like, pay attention to and ignore, is weaponized into a tool against you (ostensibly to help you see "great deals" that you might have otherwise missed) whether it is a new job opportunity, fashion choices, the vehicle you drive, or even where you eat lunch. That is where it gets annoying. And when the version of you that you present to the world is quite a bit different than the version of you that only you or your most closest confidant see, and someone outside that circle gets a peek because of your search history and what you have shown interest in? That is an existential threat to 'outing' the real you.

That information is power; The power to influence you, the power to sell to you, the power to expose you, the power to control how you see the world and ultimately control your actions in that world.

If you could imagine a machine that as people used it, it condensed bricks of pure platinum out of the air. It was a side of effect of the machines operation. And now you tell the owner of the machine, you can't sell that platinum, you need to just grind it up and throw it away. Well that isn't going to happen, even if there is a big 'for show' grinding operation taking place up in the lobby of the machine's owner. The owner might say, "I charge you nothing to use my useful machine, I am going to keep some of the platinum it produces to cover expenses.

[1] I'm using the phrase in the colloquial where a "known" person is someone who is both familiar and has been granted a certain level of access to your inner thought processes.

All of the Obama supporters who traded their personal information for a ticket to a rally or an e-mail alert about the vice presidential choice, or opted in on Facebook or MyBarackObama can now be mass e-mailed at a cost of close to zero.

That's a ...newsletter? Right?

How is that comparable, except in "It's on the internet" terms, to the Russian government secretly funding ad campaigns using illicitly gained psychometric data?