Becoming Subjects to Modern Propaganda
Consider this, Christmas is only a week away, and you still have not yet brought a gift for your 5-year-old niece. You then browse through the online marketplace, searching for the perfect toy to give as a gift. After some rounds of searching for the perfect toy, you have finally found it, and you proceed to purchase it. Then, you continue browsing the internet and found yourself aimlessly watching YouTube videos. However, you notice that every YouTube ad is about children’s toys. At this point, the algorithm behind the scenes has already built you a personalized advertisement. You, along with millions of internet users, have become mere statistics for a series of online data.
With millions of people using the internet worldwide, the internet has become a gold mine for big data. It is the perfect training ground for various machine learning applications, and these machines are learning more about us every day. One way to know that these machines are working is through personalized advertisement. We may think that personalized advertisement is a good thing because the products advertised to us are related to our interests; unfortunately, they can also harm us. One such example is how for-profit colleges target low-income high school students and veterans who are not good at planning and value emotions over logic. These individuals are being deceived by for-profit colleges thinking that they will receive a high-quality education. Unfortunately, their college diplomas would be equivalent to a high school diploma. On top of that, graduates will have to pay off their federal student loans for that college.
Fighting for our privacy against these machines is almost impossible because almost every website like Google, Facebook, and YouTube has built-in algorithms that analyze their consumers’ data. Taking action, such as clicking an ad, will encourage the algorithm to provide more ads similar to what we clicked on. Well, if clicking ads feed more info to the algorithm, we can stop clicking ads; that way, they will not collect data on us, right? Unfortunately, taking no action, like not clicking ads, still provides the algorithm information. The algorithm might conclude that we are not interested in the advertisement and will show different ads that might pique our interest.
In this modern era, the internet and big data are two sides of one coin that cannot be separated; they will always go hand in hand. If they are unavoidable from the viewer’s side, then whether they are a positive or negative aspect of the internet is all up to the creators and the programmers of the machine learning algorithms who feed on big data. Unfortunately, not every creator had good intentions; take for-profit colleges as an example. Scalability is also a problem. The internet is enormous in scale and has a far reach, which means that several people, perhaps by the millions, will be affected and targeted by the negative aspects of a personalized advertisement. As the internet becomes more prominent in our lives, we can only hope that the data that it contains is used for good intentions.
