Making Tech Headlines · Page 7
Off Switch Threatens to Interrupt Endless Personalization
· New York time
The Australian government wants to protect social media users from being served content they do not want to see, putting an off switch for algorithmic recommendations into the policy conversation. The central issue is control: whether a person can meaningfully refuse what a platform keeps deciding is relevant. Recommendation systems promise to reduce the effort of finding something interesting. The tradeoff appears when their judgment becomes difficult to escape. A user may want a particular topic once, or not at all, without appointing it permanent curator of the next several evenings. The practical policy challenge is to make choice understandable and usable, rather than merely present somewhere in a thicket of settings. A control is not much of a control if finding it requires the same determination as leaving a crowded concert through the gift shop. There is a pleasingly basic idea beneath the technical debate. A person might be allowed to say enough and have the machine accept the answer. In the attention economy, that modest exchange can sound almost futuristic. The feed has spent years learning what people click; perhaps its next achievement could be learning what they mean by stop.
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