Privacy as cultural choice and resistance in the age of recommender systems

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the role of recommender systems (RSs) and their surveillance mechanisms in the flow of culture in order to uncover some of the challenges that RSs pose to privacy theory. It also analyzes four roles that RSs perform in the organization, distribution, and management of culture, how practices of surveillance are essential to those roles, and with what consequences. The chapter examines why RSs illuminate conceptual problems with the notion of information privacy and how privacy might be related to cultural identity. It also examines the architecture of RSs, and describes their increasingly significant role in the circulation of culture by emphasizing how this role is possible in, and preconditioned on, the mobilization of an expansive apparatus of surveillance. A recommender system or engine is "any system that guides a user in a personalized way to interesting or useful objects in a large space of possible options or that produces such objects as output".