How Does the Internet See You?

This article was originally posted on August 29, 2009.

When you enter your name into Personas, a computational process kicks off that assembles a “seemingly authoritative personal profile,” beautifully presented as follows:

It’s not meant to be useful or accurate, but to spur thoughts about reliability of algorithms being created inside “black boxes” that can have significant impact on our lives: showing up on the first page of search engine results, having misinformation about us “out there” for credit reviewers or hiring managers because of past indiscretions, sharing a name with someone else, or something as simple as a misapplied tag to a photo on a social networking site, etc.

Although it took me a while to discern what is meant by “illegal” in my results (it’s not as bad as I had thought, but it did indeed make me think!), I enjoyed not only the visualization of my “on-line identity”, but also the thought that the artist put into the project.

Originally published at https://mikegil.typepad.com.