Andrew Maenza

Maenza 1

Andrew Maenza

Professor H. Culik

ENGL 1180-C1608

7 December 2016

Digital Redlining

Digital Redlining is a concept that involves how a users Internet usage is tracked, monitored and analyzed by businesses and universities. Information that is gathered from users is often sold to companies that will decide what ads to display, modify search engine results shown to the user and what to promote higher on their list in social media feeds. Information can also be monitored to block and report when a user on a system is looking up certain key words or topics. The problem with digital redlining is that it is a new front of information collection that most people do not know how to control or restrict. This leads to biased information and pesky ads from an item you may have clicked on for even a brief moment.

While some monitoring data is useful for evaluation where as users do we draw a line for personal intrusion? While some places gather data through acceptable use policies some sites and engines monitor and track what the user looks at through cookies. Acceptable use policies track what things you search while on the internet network and has certain restricted words, topics and sites. After accepting the policy everything you do is then monitored and reviewed by the system and if you try to go to something restricted by the system it will block access and sometimes push a notification about who tried to access it.While cookies can be cleared and some can be disabled that doesn’t stop them from initially gathering information from you. In social media information is tracked on things you click on and like or favorite, which political party you read articles on and even pages you click on. If two different individuals Google search the same exact thing on the search engine they will get completely different ordered results where things on one persons first page might not even come up until the results on page five for the other person. While it can be thought of as beneficial because you find what you are looking for right in front of you it also has the huge downside of you don’t end up seeing a neutral point of view on the topic. Eventually after a large sample size of online searching users generate enough data for a filter bubble to be created. A filter bubble is a result of a personalized search where websites use algorithms to selectively assign the user information to see. This information shown is determined by your search history, location and clicking tendencies. Filter bubbles steer us away from articles that we necessarily may not agree with creating very biased search results.

While the Internet is very useful for fast information, research and connecting with other people the separation of individuals’ results to be so personalized drives us away from seeing balanced points of view and creates more people who think very close-minded. While having your own opinion on a topic is not wrong the difficulty to obtain information on the other side of view is wrong. While some people will search hard to find the opposing argument of a topic they are researching the other side of that is the people that will just click on the first information put in front of them. Slowly the people who are in the middle ground between topics will diminish because they will get biased articles for one side and not research any further than that. While it is our own job to explore topics to their fullest we should not have to do things like trick search engines by clearing out history and constantly click on opposing point of view articles so our search results become not as biased.

As a population when does it get to the point where the information taken from us crosses the line and we come together to restrict some of the filtering and information they utilize?How far do we let search engines confine the information we look at and the articles sites like Facebook promote us to look at higher than others? Digital redlining and filter bubbles are unhealthy for a balanced point of view on informational research. While we can try to confuse the system why is that necessary just so we can easily read differing opinions? While some smaller things like ads from items we recently looked at on a site that day may be annoying we have to think of the repercussions all of this data gathering could cause one day if it is used for something else if they made portfolios of individuals.