It used to be that people were subject to the whims of old media, human gate-keepers who decided that type of information we should see. The Internet was supposed to change all of that, but we are now seeing startling examples that Facebook, Google, and Yahoo News among many other companies, are using algorithms to please us by giving us what they deem to be “relevant.” Author Eli Pariser, executive director of Moveon.org, asked several friends to search the same term (“Egypt”) in Google, and they received dramatically different results. It turns out that there is no longer any standard version of Google. The new version uses dozens of bits of information about you to give you what it thinks you want. Facebook also employs such relevance algorithms to weed out information, and even “friends” that it has decided that you don’t want. In the case of Pariser, whose politics are progressive, Facebook edited out information from his conservative “friends.” What would be the advantage to giving us what we want? Certainly, some of us want to live in a world where everyone appears to think the same. But such filtering would also have a commercial purpose—giving only “relevant” hits might facilitate Internet sales. In this excellent ten-minute TED talk, Pariser tells that the Internet is increasingly geared to giving us what we want to see rather than what we need to see. In this talk, Pariser has challenged the new Internet gatekeepers to make this ubiquitous filtering of information transparent and to give user control over it. We will all be better off, he warns, when we get information that makes us uncomfortable, and information that is important, as well as information that challenges us, rather than simply giving us what they think we want.