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Authors:
(1) Jonathan H. Rystrøm.
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Table of Links
6 Conclusion
Understanding how recommender systems shape our behaviour is essential to avoid manipulation. In this paper, we investigated the Amazon recommender system concerning whether it has made it harder to change preferences. By analysing the Barrier-to-Exit (Rakova & Chowdhury, 2019) of more than 50,000 users, we found a highly significant growth in Barrier-to-Exit over time, which indicates that it has indeed become harder to change preferences for the analysed users.
However, sampling bias induced by the calculation of Barrier-to-Exit makes it difficult to draw conclusions about the general population of Amazon customers. This highlights the dilemma of portability in measuring socio-technical systems (Selbst et al., 2019): accurately evaluating a concept like ”changing preferences” requires adapting to the context of the system, which makes it more difficult to generalise (and compare) to other systems.
Comparing recommender systems is necessary for ensuring that these respect human autonomy (Varshney, 2020) and live up to new regulations such as the EU AI Act (Kop, 2021). Further work, should aim to create auditing procedures and metrics that allow third parties to measure potential preference manipulation in a way that fits within the context of the industry and allows for comparisons between different systems. This will help assess the pressures of Surveillance Capitalism (Zuboff, 2019) on human autonomy.
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This paper is available on arxiv under CC 4.0 license.
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