The way the company [Facebook] handles its customer data seems highly dubious, but because of its size we should therefore come round to the idea that this type of data-driven, highly personalised portal for information and communication is not likely to disappear.
And why should it? It isn’t only the advertising industry that’s inspired by the opportunities, but also the users. After all, not one of Facebook’s 800 million customers was forced to open an account and use it for a daily average of 20 minutes. It is on an equally voluntary basis that user posts the location of their favourite cafe on Foursquare to tell the whole world where they are at any given time, or upload jogging routes to the internet to inform the world of every metre taken. People love these services and feed the algorithms and databases with great enthusiasm because they want to share their data with the world.
[…]
Relevance is the reason why you see more and more people on the train with the paper in their lap while they hold their mobile in front of it and flick through their Twitter stream. Relevance is the reason why more hotel bookings are now made through recommendation platforms than all travel agents put together. It’s the reason why readers will prefer personalised news websites to traditional media.
[…]
Transparency is one of the most important principles when it comes to throwing light on the chaos. Algorithms have to be made transparent – in how they are implemented as well as how they work.