If you're an internet addict, you might want to pay attention to the message in Eli Pariser’s new book The Filter Bubble: What The Internet Is Hiding From You (£12.99, Viking).
According to Pariser, the powers behind the web – you know who we mean, Google, Facebook, et al – have a cunning plan to restrict the information they make available to us. But why would they do that? Money, of course.
By gathering data on our likes, dislikes and location, they can tailor pages to your profile and charge extra to their advertisers. We think we’re getting what we want, but we’re not getting necessarily what we might like if we knew it existed.
Mark Zuckerberg put it a little better: ‘A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.’
If Google thinks you’re interested in squirrels rather than starving children, it will customise your search results every time you ask it. (So you put ‘famine’ into the search engine and the top result is a nut wholesaler.) It’s probably more complicated than that, but to find out how much, read the book.