61 weeks agoThe joys of personalization

This entry builds on Google is Me, so read it first if you haven't.

I just though of a few ways deep personalization could go wrong. Google is only used as an example here but I think it's the only company I know of that could pull off something like that. I'm not suggesting that this would necessarily happen nor am I worried about it. But I do think this is the kind of things we might encounter in the future.

As we know, Google is willing to try and make some decisions for you, like "what to do tomorrow" or "what job to take". It seems to me that people will be hesitant to ask this kind of questions, but what if Google brain would have already deduced that you are looking for a job? One day you could log in to Google Calendar and find a scheduled interview that you haven't put there, moreover some entries would be formulated as if you were talking to yourself, e.g. "I need to go to sleep early to be in shape tomorrow" (otherwise it would be patronizing, wouldn't it?). To give you a different example it could be "don't forget to buy milk" (delivered to your cellphone as well, whatever), which doesn't sound too bad, but what if you have looked for plasma TV prices online and later that day you're driving past a place that sells them, and your car computer reminds you, "Hey! Didn't you want to buy one of those? This place has a sale right now." Hmm.. seems like a good opportunity to auction personalized ad spots like that. Okay, but what if someone takes it further, and you start encountering people who say nice things about certain brands and whatnot. That's nothing new, but imagine it being more targeted, you visit a website and magically meet certain people later -- it would make it more economical and open this market to so many new advertisers that it won't be funny. (The initial trigger doesn't have to be Internet-related at all, it could just a photo you take, books you looked at in a shop or a change in what you bought in a grocery store this week.)

Oh, wait, this could be taken yet further, there should be an AdSense kind of thing around this. Anyone would be able to subscribe to the service, install a small application on his cellphone and then get paid every time he mentions certain products in appropriate contexts (the cellphone app is required to track the conversations, and not just over-the-phone ones). Some people would cheat at this just like with click-fraud, but whatever.

And what about personalized news? I wonder if it will be possible to game the system into presenting news with a certain perspective to people one wants to persuade into something? I mean there's so much new territory for informational warfare with personalization. And the smaller the scale the harder it would be to notice it.

To paraphrase Eric Raymond, "With enough eyeballs all tricks are shallow", but I'd add "But not if all of those eyeballs are looking in different directions".

Questions?