Ending of the year presents us with the opportunity to look back and reflect the past year. Fortunately, if you happen to be in Facebook, they provide the review for you in their "yearly review"-app. Based on your status updates of your year, the app puts them together and presents your year to you. Then you can share it. To be extra kind Facebook also pre filled the text on the status update.
In many ways, one could consider this as a nice gesture and piece of software from Facebook. Now we don’t have to do the hard work at reflecting back our year. No need to think and decide the important points. In a true style of the Silicon Valley solutionism the problem is solved. - Of course, I know I do not have to share the presentation if I don’t want to, but it is popping in my feed time and time again and every time I get shivers down my spine from this.
Why?
Well, first it reminds me of how much this big corporation knows about me, or think it knows. And the information served to us in the form of yearly review is just a fraction of data Facebook collects about us. (and sells to their advertisers.) This yearly presentation just shows us a little glimpse of the algorithms working in the background. Churning away quietly, patiently collecting all the little bits and pieces we pour into it.
It is not that algorithms are bad in some way; they are essentially just pieces of code, instructions to do predefined task. But the way and cases we use them trouble me. Why isn’t there more open algorithms aimed to enhance commonwealth and wellbeing? This video by Harlo Holmes for example, is just a tiny peek on what we could achieve with algorithms, when put on to good use. Why is it that the most sophisticated algortihms are used to gather information about us, categorising us like a herd and then selling this information to advertisers? You can be single, married, divorced, male, female, white, gay, in your mid twenties, etc. You might also be profiled to like a certain genre of clothing, music, movies. You are most active with these friends, and then your friend's data is compared to yours etc.... All this to collect a profile of the way you act, what makes you happy -how to deliver an advertisement that speaks to you. For your benefit, naturally. Another technological solution to a problem that doesn’t need solving: how to deliver ads so that they are effective and not annoying. (IMHO: all ads are annoying by their nature. )
There are naturally many more uses for algorithms; Christopher Steiner has a nice review of algorithms in his book: Automate this: How Algorithms came to rule our world.