What's wrong with the internet today

This is one of the pressing issues of modern times. We are going to address it finally. The Internet which is supposed to empower the common citizens, give a medium of expression to the users, is now covertly being structured into a constricting sphere of homologous data. Before the advent of Internet, our perspective of world news, stories and entertainment were previously limited to the mainstream media. There was a very limited source of information available to us. Seems like we are going back to that same era. All the big companies have plunged in the market to push the users against the wall. Large amounts of funds are being spent on private analytical data of users to get the highly influential data.  There are big questions of privacy, encryption and spoofing involved here. The world wide web that is supposed to widen your perspective is apparently being trivialized into a "personalized space" This stands against the basic ethos of the Internet.

Eli Pariser

The companies already know what do we want, how much do we want and why do we want even before we know it. Internet activist Eli Pariser coined a word Filter Bubble for this. Pariser strongly advocates against the filter bubble as he believes it debars the users from getting the essential information just because the information one might be looking for could be out of his filter bubble giving the user a very narrow outlook of the world. Taking an example of filter bubble in real life- If we go to library and access the books on automobiles. We follow it actively for days and if we wish to access the other parts of the library, we would be presented with some different information related to our past searches and page impressions. There would be different exposure of information among different users. The information we receive is filtered to our requirements. In a bid to make Internet more advanced and intuitive, the algorithms of Google, Facebook and Yahoo are deciding what we should access and what not. You can't say if the information is curtailed or altered. We have our mainstream media for that. The power of revolution that the Internet possesses may well fizzle out if the data at hand is manipulated or compromised.

The information we are accessing is manufactured and promoted by affiliated networks. The Internet based services which we use in exchange of giving us the service of their applications also collects our personal data which is indexed for the users to access filtered version of Internet. The links we click on, the web searches we do, our messages. Everything is fed through the algorithms. The highly used keywords are tracked and stored to present similar information for future searches. Like there was not enough search engine manipulation before now the web giants are coming up with this so called personalized effect. It has been discovered that search engine manipulation effect is found to have deep behavioural changes in people. It has had a significant amount of impact on the political campaigns around the world. Therefore it has been considered a very powerful way to alter the normal response of an individual.

Companies speak highly of value of privacy and claim to respect it but that is far from the truth. Even Whatsapp's end to end encryption is crooked. It distributes the private data to different companies claims a Quora user who shared screenshots of her conversation with a friend where they only talked about wooden furniture on Whatsapp. Whatsapp picked the keywords "wooden furniture, wooden logs, wooden interiors."  Minutes later, every question that popped up on Quora after refreshing the page was somewhat similar the keywords of their conversation. This was just a basic 15 minute test between two friends. The current Internet issues have a divided view of the world over separate channels. This goes deep and it's time we become aware of it. I wish to wake all the Netizens to be careful of this Internet phenomenon. It is our own responsibility to keep the Internet free from distortions and the gimmicks that are branded as viral content to restore the space of internet into a standard unified spectrum of information.