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and added to a record that companies use to make decisions, we might decide to be more cautious in our surfing. If we knew (or even suspected, for that matter) that purchasers of 101 Ways to Fix Your Credit Score tend to get offered lower-premium credit cards, we’d avoid buying the book. “If we thought that our every word and deed were public,” writes law professor Charles Fried, “fear of disapproval or more tangible retaliation might keep us from doing or saying things which we would do or say could we be sure of keeping them to ourselves.” As Google expert Siva Vaidhyanathan points out, “F. Scott Fitzgerald’s enigmatic Jay Gatsby could not exist today. The digital ghost of Jay Gatz would follow him everywhere.”

In theory, the one-identity, context-blind problem isn’t impossible to fix. Personalizers will undoubtedly get better at sensing context. They might even be able to better balance long-term and short-term interests. But when they do—when they are able to accurately gauge the workings of your psyche—things get even weirder.

Targeting Your Weak Spots

The logic of the filter bubble today is still fairly rudimentary: People who bought the Iron Man DVD are likely to buy Iron Man II; people who enjoy cookbooks will probably be interested in cookware. But for Dean Eckles, a doctoral student at Stanford and an adviser to Facebook, these simple recommendations are just the beginning. Eckles is interested in means, not ends: He cares less about what types of products you like than which kinds of arguments might cause you to choose one over another.

Eckles noticed that when buying products—say, a digital camera—different people respond to different pitches. Some people feel comforted by the fact that an expert or product review site will vouch for the camera. Others prefer to go with the product that’s most popular, or a money-saving deal, or a brand that they know and trust. Some people prefer what Eckles calls “high cognition” arguments—smart, subtle points that require some thinking to get. Others respond better to being hit over the head with a simple message.

And while most of us have preferred styles of argument and validation, there are also types of arguments that really turn us off. Some people rush for a deal; others think that the deal means the merchandise is subpar. Just by eliminating the persuasion styles that rub people the wrong way, Eckles found he could increase the effectiveness of marketing materials by 30 to 40 percent.

While it’s hard to “jump categories” in products—what clothing you prefer is only slightly related to what books you enjoy—“persuasion profiling” suggests that the kinds of arguments you respond to are highly transferrable from one domain to another. A person who responds to a “get 20% off if you buy NOW” deal for a trip to Bermuda is much more likely than someone who doesn’t to respond to a similar deal for, say, a new laptop.

If Eckles is right—and research so far appears to be validating his theory—your “persuasion profile” would have a pretty significant financial value. It’s one thing to know how to pitch products to you in a specific domain; it’s another to be able to improve the hit rate anywhere you go. And once a company like Amazon has figured out your profile by offering you different kinds of deals over time and seeing which ones you responded to, there’s no reason it couldn’t then sell that information to other companies. (The field is so new that it’s not clear if there’s a correlation between persuasion styles and demographic traits, but obviously that could be a shortcut as well.)

There’s plenty of good that could emerge from persuasion profiling, Eckles believes. He points to DirectLife, a wearable coaching device by Philips that figures out which arguments get people eating more healthily and exercising more regularly. But he told me he’s troubled by some of the possibilities. Knowing what kinds of appeals specific people respond to gives you power to manipulate them on an individual basis.

With new methods of “sentiment analysis, it’s now possible to guess