Humans on the Internet: “Me” as a Person, a User, a Customer

This article is more phylosophical than technical.

First things first… Let’s break down the “Me” as I like to call it.

“Me” as a person

My name is Mohamed, right? Well, this “Me” is the Mohamed known by his family, friends, wife, children, etc. It’s me as a person, the moral and physical one.
I, as a person, have a real life behaviour, hobbies, etc.

“Me” as a user

My name is still Mohamed, but I’m no longer a husband, son, dad, friend, etc. I’m just a user. My name is just some data in a database alongside millions of other person’s.
I, as a user, am seen by the service I’m using as some collection of data with assigned roles to give me the permission to take designated actions depending on the service I’m using. On facebook for exemple, I can post photos, links, comments etc. On google, I can search, write and read my emails etc.
My only purpose here is to interact with the system to take actions.

“Me” as a customer

I, as a customer, am not even Mohamed. I’m just a customer tracker throughtout the websites I visit. They know my age, my gender, my location ; and most importantly: they know my hobbies.
They don’t care about “Me” as a person. They don’t even care about “Me” as a user. They just see “Me” as a customer, and all the data they collect or process is used to make me do targetted action (like buying a T-shirt).

The relationship

It looks like an inheritance, but it’s not. Let me explain…
I am a user because I am a person. And I am a customer because I am a user. That’s all the graphic says. In a perfect world, there would be a 100% match between the 3 “Me”s ; but it’s never like that.

When I register to an internet service, I never explicitly provide every bit of information about me. Usually, web services will ask my name, email address, a password and eventually my phone number. These informations are used to build a virtual profile for me, which is basically a set of data. If I lie in these forms, it’s still “Me” as a user since I’m just providing a set of data.

Based on the actions I take as a user of different services on the internet, some interpretations are made. These interpretations are made possible by Machine Learning (which is less efficient than you probably think). So, there is a second loss of truth about “Me”. But some information are created during this process and this information is used to create “Me” as a customer. As written above, I as a customer am just a customer id. In fact, for privacy purposes, the web services I use won’t give my name, address etc. to advertisers nor other web services. But they are allowed to share a unique customer id which is associated with my behavior on their websites. This behavior is just another set of data, processed by advertisers for exemple to know which ad to show me, based on some other machine learning algorithm.

Level of Truth

Since I don’t provide all of my data, and machine learning can’t build a profile that matches 100% with me, there’s a level of truth between each “Me”. Thus, my real life behavior never matches my behavior on the Internet.
For example, I can see a Tesla dealer everyday on my way to work, and never get in to see the cars because I know I’m not wealthy enough to buy this kind of car. And at the same time, I can be a Tesla fanboy and visit their website a few times just because I’m dreaming about buying one. With this kind of behavior, Machine Learning algorithms may think I’m wealthy and then, I will always show me Tesla, Alfa Romeo, Jaguar cars, etc. in my ads while the best car I can afford is just a Mazda 3 (lol).

I wrote this article on a whim, just because I was feeling a bit phylosophical this evening. I hope you’ll like it though. I’m just trying something new. If you guys like it, put some claps on it and I might write more articles like this one.

Thanks.