Hayley Vrana & Jonni Padilla

1. What the Internet is Hiding From You Chapter 1 Hayley Vrana & Jonni Padilla

2. The John Irving Problem Jeff Bezos discovered a new way of selling books He started his idea with a venture capitalist, but they didn’t take his idea seriously Bezos began his research at institutions that were beginning to study a new field called “cybernetics” Before he started Amazon the internet was still a small business, but once Amazon got going it brought in more users Bezos wanted the experience to be just as personal as going to one of the big chain bookstores, it would find related books to what the customer had bought The key component to the companies success is their personalization engine and publishers would trick the system by buying off algorithms to promote books by Amazon software

3. Click Signals Founders of Google Larry page and Sergey Brin were intrigued by Amazons success and decided to make a different type of website While Amazon used algorithms to sell products they wanted to see if they could use them to sort through sites on the web They considered a webpage linked to another page could be considered a vote for that page when selected and this was called a click signal When Google began it was Goolge.stanford.edu and they were convinced that it should be a nonprofit and advertising free Page was especially obsessed with AI which is why he wanted to make it capable of knowing their users With every click the site got closer and closer to becoming the ultimate search engine In 2004 they came out with Gmail which helped the engine be further personalized with its user by finding out which ads were clicked on and what emails were received and sent

4. acebook Everywhere • Mark Zuckerberg a college student at Harvard created Facebook in hopes of having a social media website made just for college students • He wanted it to be a very simple website that was like nothing else, he wanted it to take advantage of real world social connections • Facebook used the EdgeRank algorithm which rests on 3 factors • The first is affinity which means the more time you interact with another person’s profile the more likely it is to show up on the newsfeed • The second is relative weight of that kind of content, items such as relationship statuses are weighted highly • The Third is time, recently posted items are weighted over old ones • The aim of Facebook was simple, make the whole web social • The more locked in users are the easier to convince them to log in and when you are constantly logged in companies can keep tracking data even when you are not on their site

5. The Data Market • A company called Acxiom, an online database which largely helped the U.S. government discover more information on the 9/11 hijackers that they wouldn’t have known without it • Acxiom has such massive databanks which takes up 5 acres in Arkansas • Just a little bit of information on what they know(the entire list is about 1,500 items long) • The names of their family members • Their current and past addresses • How often they pay their credit card bills • Whether they own a dog or cat and what breed • If they are right or left handed • And the type of medication they use • Many marketing websites use this company with a practice called behavioral retargeting which means if you go on a website and see something you might want to buy but you choose not to your computer will continue to show you advertisements on the specific product

6. Summary This chapter is about how algorithms and practices began to be used by companies and social media while the internet was still young.