The Personalized Web

The Personalized Web traces the history of personalization from Web 2.0 recommendation and engagement systems to generative AI, reconstructing how digital systems have learned to observe, classify, predict, and act on their users.

Personalization promised convenience and relevance, but realizing that promise required increasingly detailed representations of individual behaviour, attention, preferences, relationships, and appearance. The project reconstructs this history from successive versions of applications, decompiled code, interfaces, algorithm papers, technical documentation, and legal proceedings. Reading these sources together allows us to examine how the categories and inferences used to model users changed over time, and how personalization developed from targeted recommendation into increasingly intimate forms of computational knowledge and intervention.