A Feeling like a lab rat?
The pros and cons of internet A/B product testing
Test me all night long, baby. Sign me up to be the subject of A/B testing. I’ll sign a blanket consent form so that Silicon Valley’s biggest brains can test me for the purpose of improving the human future.
You’ve likely been A/B tested without your knowledge if you’ve ever used Google or Facebook. With A/B testing, different users are given different variants of a website or an email or a purchasing button to test what small changes online make you more likely to click, or read, or buy something.
If you’re reading this column online, you could be being A/B tested right now — with different readers seeing different headlines, and different responses being measured.
This is good. A/B tests, conducted repeatedly and carefully, allow for refinements and improvements in our designs, our interfaces, and our products. Google has optimized its globe-dominating search business via such testing.
Facebook is similarly devoted to A/B testing to refine its site. On the other side is Snap, which doesn’t like to make constant adjustments. Is that why Snap is facing such challenges in keeping users?
We should demand even more from A/B testing. The human race must improve all sorts of systems — energy, traffic, food, water, even governing systems — if we’re going to avoid self-inflicted disasters, from climate change to wars.
So why don’t we commit ourselves to a culture of continuous optimization in the real world, not just the virtual?
BI am not your test subject, baby. And I don’t want to be Silicon Valley’s guinea pig. Yes, the Internet is full of fine print to inform me I’m being tested. But that doesn’t mean I’m being meaningfully asked for my consent.
My online time is now given over to companies experimenting upon me for the purpose of getting me to make choices that reveal which variables will change my own behavior online. In essence, I’m a dystopian lab rat forced to design the maze — and the reward — that will entrap me.
What do I receive in return? Facebook tells me its free services are my compensation, but studies also tell me that spending more time on Facebook —which is the goal of many of their experiments — makes me less happy.
Sadness is not a method of payment I accept.
Such testing has created an unacknowledged ethical and public health crisis. The more we click, the more we’re being tested. And if experiments show how to make us spend more time online than is healthy, or to spend more money than is good for our finances, aren’t we being harmed by our own testimony?
In other fields of study, society has standards for governing the testing of human subjects. But these standards aren’t being applied to all the A/B testing we experience online.
There are questions here for our faltering democracy, too. California has hundreds of companies that will help interest groups or campaigns test the best ways to manipulate us for their political purposes.
But is such human testing a factor in the rise of polarization and fake information?
This world of testing needs real regulation—by the same authorities, and under the same laws, that regulate business practices in the name of protecting people from health and financial threats.
To start, let’s add regulation of A/B testing to the privacy regulations that some jurisdictions impose on tech companies.
A/B testing is also impersonal — it’s not good at capturing the identities and needs of individual users. Smart people in Silicon Valley know this, which is why they are moving beyond A/B testing to the realm of machine learning, a world of algorithms that learn about each individual user.
The promise of machine learning is that, some day, the algorithms will continuously improve in giving each individual user customized products.
But in testing their way into such a future, California’s brightest brains are simultaneously hiding behind their screens and intruding into their fellow citizens’ lives.
Yes, their goal is to improve commerce, communication, the human experience. Yes, we can choose, A or B. But how much choice does constant testing really give us test subjects about our collective future?
Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.