Privacy vs personalization: The risks and rewards of engineered serendipity

[Commentary] Facebook’s 2012 newsfeed experiment has recently attracted the ire of users and even European regulators, who are investigating a possible breach of users’ privacy.

Although Facebook’s tinkering with its users’ emotions was part of a minor sociological experiment, many online companies are dedicated to using personalization to enable serendipity or “accidental discovery” of content by web users.

The Internet has provided the setting for the grandest and perhaps most controversial of experiments in “engineered” serendipity. Search engines, e-commerce and online news publications are all using personalization to enhance user experience by providing the most relevant content.

But is it actually possible to embed serendipity into user experience online? “The notion of ‘designing for serendipity’ is an oxymoron because once we try to ‘engineer’ it into a system, users may no longer perceive the experience as serendipitous,” says Dr. Stephann Makri, a lecturer in Information Interaction at City University in London. “Designers of interactive systems shouldn’t try to offer serendipity on a plate. Instead, they should design tools that create opportunities for users to have experiences they might perceive as serendipitous.”

Nonetheless this reworked notion of serendipity is here to stay on the web. With the rise of machine learning, a growing number of online publishers are using complex algorithms to learn from readers’ viewing habits and provide people with what they want to know before they know they want it. In essence, we get more of the information we want to see.

[Patani is an analyst for EC1 Capital, a venture capital investor in mobile and web companies in the United Kingdom]