Personalisation, Privacy, and Public Fragmentation

Belinda Barnet

“You are being followed. Not by a person — by the 800-odd cookies dropped by websites on your own machine, by GPS and the apps that use it from your own phone even when you are not using them, by your own purchases on cards and on devices, and by the algorithms used to parse all that data for behavioural patterns — patterns that are then used to personalise your media content (and to sell you things). The companies specifically set up to aggregate and parse your data are called data brokers — they sell their profiles to platforms like Facebook and Forbes to tailor content for you, along with a myriad other companies. In this article, I will discuss the phenomenon of personalisation, how it makes life easier, and its effects on the public sphere — but it cannot be discussed without first explaining how you pay for it. You pay for it with your private data …”