Nowadays we each generate a huge amount of data, whether we use the internet, drive to work, or go grocery shopping. And we continuously make decisions which affect our privacy but also the convenience of using new services. Especially companies on the internet have optimized their user experience in order to keep visitors on the website and make them accept far reaching terms of services to gather ever more data. Our installation illustrates this dilemma and allows visitors to try new paths in their digital routine in a playful way. There they can - and should - make errors!

What can go wrong in our digital daily routine? How much are our decisions affecting our privacy? Try it and find out!

The main concept about the installation is easy:  Ask visitors about their privacy settings / privacy handling and see if you can make them think twice in the future how they deal with their data.

We presented 23 questions on multiple screens and gave 46 answers.

Privacy question examples:

Do you use WhatsApp?

YES: Your phone book information has been uploaded to WhatsApp. Even from contacts who do not agree.

NO: It is harder to stay in touch with your friends.

Do you give Facebook access to all your phone contacts?

YES: Now Facebook creates/extends shadow profiles from people with no Facebook accounts.

NO: You care for your contacts' privacy, but now you don’t find friends easily.

It was great to see so many people playing with our installation and you could literally see how they started to think about the topic.

Sidestory: The Innovation Lab at the Japan Broadcasting Corporation met us at our booth and they were very interested in our Installation. They really liked the idea and asked if the source code is available. Of course also our exhibition project is also open source!

We will go through the technical implementation in on of the next posts, because this is another story :)  

More images in our flickr gallery!