How do they do that? Search engines use a variety of factors, including a user’s search history, likes, browser or location to filter results. While this may seem harmless at first, it has consequences that are hard to detect.

It first means that websites and services may get demoted in the results if the search engine thinks they are less useful to you. This in turn may limit access to information, as results are moved to the back pages. It may also mean that you will see more news and information that you agree with and less that you would disagree with.

Companies like Google are also pushing more of their own content into the results, either by favoring sites such as YouTube or Google+ in the results, or by plastering ads in so many locations that it becomes harder to distinguish them from the search results.

But it is not only the search engines that filter information for users. Facebook does it to, by looking at a user’s likes and links that get clicked on. You may as a consequence see more news that some users post, and less that others post.

This algorithmic approach has its flaws, which many users may not realize immediately. Many may feel confirmed in their believes and ideas when the majority of information they see are tailored to their likes. The danger here is that these users will only see one piece of the puzzle, that they will miss out on information and that this leads to uneducated decisions.

Take a look at this Ted Talk video about the Filter Bubble concept:

Escape

It is not easy to escape the bubble completely. When it comes to search engines, you can move to engines that do not filter or personalize results. This means no Google, no Bing, no Yahoo but search engines like DuckDuckGo. But search engines are not the only ones that filter and personalize results.

Switching to another search engine is one thing, but what about sites like Facebook? You could obviously move to another social networking site or none at all, but most users are likely not willed to make that step. One option would be to contact the site owners or support to let them know how you feel about it, and that you want unfiltered news and information.

The thing is, if you want access to unfiltered information, you need to compromise. And this means letting services and websites know how you feel about the issue, and if nothing changes switching to other services that do not filter data in that extent.

Filters are not that far away from censorship and manipulation. And that’s scary.

What’s your take on the matter?

The filter list grows over time, I know mine does and becomes ineffective this way due to duplicate entries and ineffective usage of space in the filter list. Thankfully though the Adblock website offers a way to optimize this filter list to make it more effective. Before you can start with the optimization you need to export your current filter list.

Press CTRL + SHIFT + A to open Adblock Plus. Click on Filters > Export Filters to save the filter list as a text document. Now load the Adblock Plus optimization website and paste the contents of the saved filtered list into the form.

The default options that are available at the bottom should be sufficient for most users. Just make sure you check Optimize including preexisting RegExes if you already have an optimized version but added new filters to that one. Click on the optimize button which should display some stats and of course the new optimized filter list.

Now copy and paste the new filter list into a text document and import it again into Adblock Plus. Press CTRL + SHIFT + A again and click on Filters > Import Filters. Select the text document that contains the updated filter list and click ok. Make sure you select Overwrite when asked if you want to overwrite or append the filter list.

My filter list, which only contained 12 lines and 364 chars was reduced to 1 line and 251 chars which means a reduction of 91.7 % and 31 %.

Update:

Wladimir Palant from Adblock Plus contacted me and told me that Adblock Plus users should use the following two scripts if they want to optimize their filter list:

http://adblockplus.org/en/deregifier
http://adblockplus.org/en/redundancy_check

According to the Pro Piracy Lobby website the provider experienced some heavy fire from disgruntled customers and privacy & free speech groups. It seems that the pressure on the provider was this intense that they decided to retract their decision and apologize to their customers.

Together with our new chairman of the board, the management agrees that limiting Internet access is not within the framework of our business, says Fredrik Winbladh, President of Perspektiv Bredband.

It is of great importance the we as a telecom and Internet operator, a so called common carrier, focus on delivering information. We can’t risk our position being questioned given the previous statement. The management and the company learned a lot from the debate that took place and we will use this experience to keep developing according to our vision of becoming the prime broadband choice of the Öresund region (Southern Sweden), says new Chairman Mikael Paulsson.

Two interesting statements. It seems that this episode clearly shows that companies will listen to their customers if only enough raise their voice.

A user of the donation coder forum suggested a new application that would automatically move files that were in the process of being placed on the desktop to a selected folder. You may choose a folder on your own and select to exclude file extensions and file types from this process. Everything else will be moved if the application is running in the background.

Last but not least you may choose to add notes to files that are moved or disable that option completely. I was thinking that the application could be enhanced by adding filters to it that would move files to different folders if you choose to.

The program stays in the system tray, can be paused if you like and resumed at a later time. It also has a right-click entry that takes you directly to the folder that you have chosen.