Notes

everything on the internet gets paid for, one way or another. If you’re not paying yourself, you’re some other player’s currency. The customer is the advertiser, and you, your friendships and your beliefs are what is being very profitably sold. This is why Facebook and Google and all the rest are so keen to track you on screen and off. This is how they know or make very well-informed guesses at your sex, age, location, relationships, ethnicity and sexual preference, and that is how Facebook in the US has been caught offering real estate ads that discriminate against named ethnic groups. The American investigative journalism site ProPublica was able to place an ad targeted very precisely at people in New York who were looking for housing, but not black, Asian or Hispanic. Facebook defended itself by saying that “ethnic affinity” was not the same as race, which the company does not ask about directly: it is instead a measure derived from looking at what stories people like, who they are friends with, and which websites they visit. There’s no reason to suppose the company intended to facilitate or condone illegal discrimination. But the story remains a chilling illustration of the power and reach of big data. Imagine what will happen when this is bent to political ends.