The Creepy Internet

“In the absence of clearly-defined goals, we become strangely loyal to performing daily trivia until ultimately we become enslaved by it.” — Robert A. Heinlein

Privacy intrusion, the surveillance state. Call it The Creepy Internet.

A few months ago, I attended a day-long seminar at a well-known global technology company. They are partnering tirelessly with companies applying machine learning, big data and artificial intelligence to know you better than you know yourself.

We’ve all experienced ‘stalker’ ads that follow you around online - even after you've bought the product - but this goes way beyond that level of creepiness.

It’s not simply that disconcerting feeling of seeing a product before you consciously knew you wanted it. We piece together ‘reality’ from a remarkably small amount of information, and increasingly that reality is manipulated through your connection to the digital world.

This can be positive: it can help us make healthy choices, avoid traffic jams, keep in touch with friends. But a darker — and creepier — side is due to the sheer complexity of the Internet. These services are increasingly in the hands of algorithms.

Algorithms self-learn. Their priority is keeping you hooked on the platform. Even if it makes you angrier, lonelier or more dependent. Anyone who has done safeguarding for young people, they call this ‘grooming’.

Now don’t get paranoid, get positive. Be informed. Protect your privacy. Consciously plan to spend time with family, friends, your kids or simply a good (non-digital) book (it's more important than ever to take screen breaks). And start to resist…the Creepy Internet.

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Read: 'Hello World' by Dr Hannah Fry is a highly readable, sobering yet balanced attempt to explain how algorithms work, alert you to the dangers of placing blind trust in them, and suggest ways we can insert 'humans back into the loop'.

Deep dive: your tendency to generalise from small samples is both critical to survival yet puts you at risk from exploitation by tech. This article from Farnam Steet dives into the psychology (and maths) behind this mental kink and what you can do to compensate.

Next steps: The Center for Human Technology is an initiative created by some of the technologists who helped build the creepy Internet. They don't mince words: “the extractive attention economy is tearing apart our shared social fabric”. Blimey. They have a dedicated page of first steps as you take control of tech and return it to being a set of useful tools, not a way to warp your reality.