Here's an interesting TED talk by Eli Pariser (of Upworthy fame) that still rings true.

Personalisation is one clever way of filtering the massive amount of information on the web, based on who you are. Almost every website does this today. I bet Google, Facebook and Netflix combined have a better idea of who I am than I do. But do they have any idea of who I aspire to be? How does this get factored into their algorithms and recommendation engines? So here's an experiment that I'm going to undertake this week. I'll be depersonalising the web just to see if the information that I get is any different. More on this soon...