Profiling: How Predictive Algorithms Shape Identity and the Social Fabric - Hardcover

Huneman, Philippe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1503646319 ISBN 13: 9781503646315

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2026

Synopsis

In this book, philosopher Philippe Huneman aims to offer an unprecedented and systematic understanding of a simultaneously banal and singular phenomenon of modern life: the digital profile. Diving deeply into the algorithms that produce these profiles, Huneman examines the way in which an individual becomes a predictable subject, both as unwilling producer of their digital profile and unwitting subject of digital marketing's attempts to influence beliefs and behaviors.

  As the book demonstrates, today's society of profiling has profound implications for our understanding of self and politics. The book unfolds across three sections. In the first, Huneman explains profiles and profiling as they operate today and describes their contemporary pervasiveness, using examples from a variety of fields and considering the wide range of types of data that can be digitalized―be they traces, search histories, metadata or the like. In the second section, on profiles, Huneman reflects on who is the subject of profiling societies and what kind of consequences profiling has on individuals―from behavior to memory. And, finally, entering into metaphysical questioning, the book shines a spotlight on the feedback loop that develops between algorithmic profiling and reality.

About this title

About the Author

Philippe Huneman is Director of Research at the Institut d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Sciences et des Techniques (CNRS/Paris I Pantheon Sorbonne), and the author, most recently of Why: The Philosophy Behind the Question (Stanford, 2023).

Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1503646319
• ISBN 13: 9781503646315
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 342