Me and My Algorithm, Seth Freeman, nyt op ed

This op-ed piece really has nothing to say about algorithms in the computer science sense of the word. Apparently in common usage algorithm is now related to those pieces of code that peak over your shoulder at your emails and offer suggestions for things it thinks you want. The author mentions how when reading an email he got from a friend that mentioned holocaust deniers it helpfully offered adds for holistic dentists. This kind of simple word match and weighting is not what we think of when we are preparing to learn or teach algorithms. But the piece is fun for other reasons.

When I taught this spring, one of the things that made the class animated was the discussion of whether cloud based email services should be doing this kind of analysis on our emails. I could argue that it was merely a machine and that no human ever saw their words but it gave them little comfort. They were profoundly disturbed by this. There is a clear collision between the desire to monetize a free service with new and improved advertising and people's sense of privacy.

In the end the article doesn't even begin to suggest the depths to which modern advertising can go in gathering, analyzing and categorizing us so as to better match their pitches to our needs and and ability to pay. Someday soon some poor schmuck will wake up to find that the ads next to his emails are no longer selling Benz's but Corollas since he just got sacked last week. Ain't that a kick in the pants.