Crystal promises to help people write emails so perfectly aligned with recipients’ interests that the people who get them feel like they’ve found a kindred spirit. It’s a brilliant business idea. And it’s an unsettling example of how little control we have over our personal data.
11 comments:
My knee-jerk reaction to the technology covered in the article was pretty negative. While the baseline problem that this application will allow us to manipulate each other more easily is definitely still an issue, there's another underlying problem that the author didn't really address: why are we now using computers to tell us things about people that we used to be able to deduce ourselves? Reading people and discovering what makes them tick isn't a novel idea, and while some people are better at it than others the idea is still the same. Using past purchases, reviews, and things posted online seems much more invasive and insulting to the person you're researching than just using your interactions with them to deduce things about their personality. I guess where things get lost in translation is when you try to apply what you know about someone's personality to how you would interact with that personality. I think programs like this are examples of how we've turned to technology to tell us things about our fellow human beings that used to be taken from just daily interactions.
This freaks me out! I cannot fathom why this is necessary and while I understand that it is useful...goodness gracious. I agree with Lucy that the real underlying problem is, why can't we deduce these things by talking to other humans like we are humans with emotional skills. This makes me wonder if we are slowly evolving to get rid of our emotions and empathy, like it's a vestigial part of our bodies and who we are. We don't have to grunt any more but soon we won't need feelings either. Ultimately, I think if I found out someone had used this program to talk to me, I'd be pretty upset and unsure how to feel. Overall I get that this is useful, and that it would be a great way of getting past the 'my resume only goes through a computer and never to a human' problem, but I feel like this is kind of a silly way to accomplish this. Another issue is that it freaks me out any time a single company is analyzing my personal online data based on my online footprint...creepy and scary.
It’s not only you Abby, this thing is really such a creeper!!! This could be a super valid reason of me stop using all the social media and everything that could potentially be a source for some creepy programs like this to track me up online.
Wait…… How can you? Really…Social Media is a lie and a person can be completely different from the actual flesh and soul. I’ve seen so many people who work there ass off just to look so amazing on Instagram and always check-in at the finest restaurant and make people believes she is such a big BIG fan of comic con but when you actually talked to her you knew right away she just did it to impress a guy and she knows nothing about comic con. Like NOTHING but she remembered all the character names the same way she study organs names before biology exams. I really don’t like the idea of this Crystal thing and I think the most important thing on being a wise and mature and successful person is to be able to acknowledge another person’s personally by yourself! It’s a human nature thing for god sake! We’re not a robot why on earth do we need a program to figure out for us how to freaking talk to this person to make her like me???????
Kind of going against the grain here... I think this service is hilariously awesome. I don't know exactly how useful the analysis it provides is... but I don't see any reason not to equip yourself with another potentially useful tool, especially given that the amount of online data it combs through is pretty impressive. Even if it only tells me that somebody likes to have meetings with food, that's already a valuable tidbit. I signed up to try it out.. I could also see how if you're writing a cold email to somebody, pulling up some information on the them scraped from online sources could also be marginally useful. I don't really get/see how something like this is sinister. There are a million bajillion services and companies that scrape online data and run analysis on it.. This service just happens to think it can make money by selling that analysis back to consumers. I say good for them! I'm rooting for them to be successful, even if I am somewhat skeptical that their algorithms will actually produce anything genuinely useful or insightful.
With technology developing so fast these days, more and more things are getting more convenient. However, there are some things that we should do on our own, such as communicating with others. This software can be particularly useful for emailing people you don’t know very well/business purposes, but it sort of reminds me of those movies where technology crosses the line and takes over the world. I think emails are electronic versions of real life conversations, so we should write like how we would normally talk. Or else, with those carefully aligned and designed emails, it’s hard to tell whether people who use it really share something in common or if it’s just the software.
In addition to the other points mentioned above about invasion of privacy and the disturbing trend to out-analyze emotional development, I think this software also is a function of increasingly blurred lines between work life and home life, which I don’t think is particularly healthy or productive. If a potential or current employer has the ability to mine all of my social media for analytics about my disposition and personality, then they are able to draw conclusions from a fairly limited representation of my personality, my online presence, before I even walk through the door. While of course employers look at social media and try to spot red flag-type posts, the human component of purposely searching for my social media profiles is an event-based search, where a person is looking for specifics: Am I a blatant racist? Do I party and say terrible things about my boss on Facebook? What this software does is use an internet spider to mine all of those individual events and draws conclusions about them, which is patently misleading and, to me, sets a precedent of mistrust and undermining that I would prefer not to have with an employer.
This is certainly an interesting idea. However, I think this is one of those cases where the process of learning to do the real thing is much more beneficial than having it done for one’s self. Conversation over email is tricky to say the least, especially if one is still developing a relationship with one’s contact. Learning how to phrase a particular statement for maximum effect teaches one how to communicate better. In the short term, this tool can work well (keeping in mind that it is based on an algorithm, of which no perfect one exists), but it is worth it to invest the time and thought to be able to communicate well without this tool. Communication is a skill that is learned over a long period of time, and one could argue that one never stops learning it. That being said, I think this tool is a potentially damaging shortcut.
This concept is very creepy, but at the same time intriguing. The fact that our personalities can be boiled down to a few sentences based on past internet usage is really quite strange. It Also raises the question of how accurate this technology really is. The author of the article didn’t like how her personality was summed up in a few sentences, but never said that it wasn’t true. This software could be considered a breach of privacy as it delves deep into past and private information. However, there are some positives as well. Communicating with others can be made easier and more tailored to each person's preferences. As theatre is an industry that works with a variety of people that think in different ways, this type of technology could help communication across different areas. I would be fine with someone using this to communicate better with me; I would be interested in what the software has to say.
This new service may be masquerading as helpful, but is really helping kill the last bit of interpersonal communication. Yes, crafting the perfect e-mail can be a challenge, getting to know people enough to do so it is also hard, but we need to do this. We can not treat everyone like robots. If we begin to treat everyone like a machine generated personality, it can not go well. This kind of emotionally behavioral analysis was perviously just used for profilers. While they have been targeting ads for specific demographics for years, actually formulating written personality traits, on an emotional level seems a step to far. If used responsibly, it may assist in important e-mails when applying for a job to someone you never met. I think the main issue will come in when people take what ‘crystal’ says and never form their own opinion, or form it based upon what they are told by this machine.
This is a very cool idea, and could be really helpful for people who are not well-versed in writing professional, efficient, or effective emails. I’ve had to basically wade through wordy emails to try and find the specifics about what a person is asking, or even worse, to find that the specifics were left out! I don’t think a service like this could help prevent those types of errors, but it could at least be a start to writing better emails.
The issue here, as we often find with intriguing applications/services of this type, is the basic groundwork the service performs for it to be able to work in the first place. I don’t think what this service would be able to rake up from the internet would be an accurate examination of what types of emails I send, because emails are private communications and I keep a lot of my online life private. The things I post publicly are usually casual and not all that revealing, or very professional and refined. So I’m not sure if this service could get an accurate read on me, or anyone else for that matter.
I think a better model could be one that just told you how to write a better email in general – like a word processor specifically geared for email that operates as a plugin for your email browser. Maybe then, privacy concerns aside, it could track the emails you send, and the ones you receive, and create profiles based on that information. I feel that that may even be preferable to sketchy online background checks. AND, you’d hopefully learn in the process.
I’m not sure if I’d go so far as to call this software sinister, but I suppose that makes for a more interesting title. From what I understand from the article and poking around Crystal’s website, the software researches the people you are corresponding with and uses the information it gathers to analyze their personality. The information is only coming from what that person has posted publicly online. Perhaps Knibbs, and many others, find the software unsettling, and it might not be as accurate as it advertises, but the way I see it, all Crystal does is more efficiently do what people already do. I already adjust the way I email people based on what I know about them, and if I’m emailing someone I’ve never met, I try to figure out a bit about them to decide what to say. Crystal isn’t finding ways to access private information and analyzing people. It is just using the information readily available online, which, isn’t particularly sinister. I can see the argument that it is manipulative, but as I said, I feel like it is just a more extreme and efficient version of what we already do. That being said, I know I'd feel weird about using Crystal, even if I can't put my finger on why.
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