I was also perplexed by this as several categories didn't seem to fit me at all. I was also shocked by a rather large section marked "illegal". Thanks to a link below from rrival, the philosophy behind the program is a mix of art and social awareness. We all expect computers to be infallible giving a precise characticture of ourselves from data. However, the computer is intrinsically unaware of many human traits and can't differentiate appropriately. Judging from my own reactions and those of others thus far, we haven't yet grasped this concept.
The philsophy: "In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant."
The philsophy: "In a world where fortunes are sought through data-mining vast information repositories, the computer is our indispensable but far from infallible assistant. Personas demonstrates the computer's uncanny insights and its inadvertent errors, such as the mischaracterizations caused by the inability to separate data from multiple owners of the same name. It is meant for the viewer to reflect on our current and future world, where digital histories are as important if not more important than oral histories, and computational methods of condensing our digital traces are opaque and socially ignorant."