Empowering the People of the Internet: Jennifer Goldbeck's ideas on an educated user-base
Jennifer Goldbeck speaks out as a computer scientist some of the ways that users are being exploited by social media sites and shares a hopeful idea for an educated user-base in the future in her TED Talk "The Curly Fry Condundrum: Why social media 'likes' say more than you might think". In this talk, Goldbeck explains some of the quesitonalbtl ways that websites are using internet users data in order to promote themselves and make a profit.
She goes on to say that some of the ways that computer science is working to find out information about users is through their Facebook likes, which many users might not realize. This information is being used to target them and gather information that may not be consented by the individuals, such as sexual orientation, drug-use history or even, in a case that she brings up, childbearing or not. This information can be extremely sensitive and for companies to be digging around in people's personal lives, without their consent or even knowledge, then exploiting that information to give to outside companies who then target you as a consumer, seems to be extremely controversial.
This kind of occurrence can illuminate some of the many gray areas that the internet has created. Is there such thing as privacy online? Is this something that everyone should be educated on and made aware? Where do we draw the line?
Goldbeck pushes that we must push forward in our internet future to allow for these sorts of things to develop in the technological world. She explains that we need to make informed decisions about what we share online and in order to do that, computer scientists need to continue to support these ideas, which she happily shares is very commonly supported in this field.
I think what Goldbeck brings up is something everyone needs to consider with the internet. It is such an amazing and helpful tool that has been able to create ways for people to overcome enormous obstacles. However, we need to understand the openness of this tool. We need to understand how young the internet is and how much is yet to be tapped in this market. Another big issue that I am seeing online is new parents posting a continuous flow of their children online. What they do not understand is that these computers, these algorithms, are making sense of their child and creating a profile for them- whether it is public or not. Computers are understand who that child is and watching them grow up. This all falls in a large gray area, but privacy is everything, especially for your children. This child is not having any say in what is being posted about them and it seems scary to give that kind of power to a website that might not have their interest in mind, but perhaps the toy store that is marketing a new action figure that they could be interested in...
It seems perhaps paranoid, but its important to understand that the internet is in a very different place than it was 15 years ago and it will continue to evolve. This awareness will be vital in order to make smart decisions online. Shouldn't we become educated on how it works so that we can promote this habit of awareness in the future?









