Learning from an April Fool’s joke

Yesterday an animated gif and a misjudged prank provoked the ire of thousands of Internet users. As an April Fool’s joke, Google temporarily enabled a feature that let users have the “last word” in an email exchange, by blocking attempted replies. It had to be discontinued after complaints that inadvertent clicks on the wrong button had disrupted many users’ personal and business correspondence. The cheeky animation which accompanied the feature – a Minion from the Despicable Me series disguised as the queen of England, dropping a microphone – also turned up in inappropriate and embarrassing contexts, such as a funeral home’s correspondence with grieving parents. A swift apology, and the withdrawal of the feature, prevented the joke from turning into a public relations disaster, but this storm in a teacup should remind us of the dangerous overlap between our virtual and actual lives.

We move between the real world and its digital facsimiles so seamlessly that we often fail to notice their differences. One example of this is the way that young children who have grown accustomed to hi-tech devices are often disappointed when photographs on actual printed material, like magazine covers, can’t be resized by a pinch-to-zoom gesture. Even before they can speak this function has been hardwired into their brains. We may smile at their confusion, but the amount of trust we collectively place in screens is no less naive, and much of what we think we know about the Internet turns out to be just as illusory.

Internet searches, for instance, are one of the most deceptively transparent activities – we enter a search term and an algorithm offers links to what we are looking for. Most of the time the results are so useful, and accurate, that we hardly pay attention to the complexity of the exchange. How many of us know, for instance, that Google tracks several dozen signals in order to tailor results to our individual needs? These include the type of computer used, the place and time of the search, and data mined from our Gmail accounts and YouTube histories. A search for ‘Egypt’ from an opinionated millennial, for example, may fetch links to political turmoil, or the Arab Spring, while the same query on her parents’ computers will retrieve tourism information and images of the pyramids.

Our assumptions that the Internet is a single objective and independent thing has become increasingly outmoded as technology companies learn how to analyze their users. Facebook, for example, mines its data so effectively that it carefully shares with your friends only the fraction of your posts and updates that is likely to interest them. While this unquestionably makes for a more engaging user experience, it also severely restricts the actual flow of information that we believe we are sharing via social media. Discreet filtering probably doesn’t worry most of us, but it does illustrate our general lack of knowledge of the ways that digital platforms often function. It also helps us to overlook the fact that countries like Saudi Arabia – which blocks some 400,000 sites which discuss sensitive political, religious, or social issues – implement massive daily censorship with little difficulty.

The abuse of our credulity towards computer screens is a large and growing business. In addition to identity theft and phishing attacks – which are both extremely lucrative for global organized crime networks – some overtly criminal startups have made fortunes by fooling people into believing that their computers have been infected by a virus, or digitally ‘frozen’ by law enforcement agencies and can only be restored through the purchase of particular software or the payment of a ‘fine’. There are now even scams that allow new Twitter accounts to quickly obtain thousands of digital followers, lending them a false legitimacy.

Marc Goodman, the author of Future Crimes, a compelling survey of the many ways that criminals take advantage of our amateurish use of digital information systems, writes that: “The profound risk of life in a technologically mediated world is that it creates mammoth opportunities for information to be manipulated in undetectable ways that most neither expect nor understand.” It seems ironic then that an April Fool’s joke should be one of the few occasions on which so many Internet users first noticed that carelessness in their digital lives can have unwelcome consequences in the real world.