IN THE SHADOW OF PRIVACY
JAN 2015 - MAY 2015 / Semester 2, MA: Design Informatics
Groupwork (5 people), personal role: videographer, movie editor, movie poster designer, etc.
Project "In the Shadow of Privacy" comes from course "Digital Media Studio Project (DMSP)".
In the current society, public information becomes more and more. You can find almost everything as long as you want. However, when public information is increasing every day, it means that more confidential information is released. Have you ever thought that when you find others’ confidential information is gradually shared, you lose your privacy at the same time. So many private things become public without realizing it: what you like, where you have been, whom you were talking to... but still, people do not care so much about their dwindling privacy. That is why we want to do something to improve the awareness of protecting our personal privacy.
In this case, we launched a series of activities. We started from communal activity. And then narrowed down the scope to a person, with whose experience stressing the importance of protecting privacy. Finally we came back to the public again. Cut directly to the core of the subject with an exhibition. The project has two phases: the first phase is about a "Free Cookies" activity; the second phase is an exhibition that contains a short movie and other related activities.
FREE COOKIES
1 / Activity Description
In the first phase, we launched a Free Cookie event, which was held for personal information exchanged by giving out free cookies, to mimic Internet Cookies so that we can explore to what extent people have awareness to the privacy issue and then got an understanding about how students feel about disclosing their personal details.
In our survey, we gathered nearly sixty students’ information as our research sample including their full name, Facebook account, Email address and nationality. Y** F**, a Malaysian student who studies in the University of Edinburgh, was selected to be the main target of our project. By deep searching of his information from Internet, we designed a profile for him. In this profile, we came up with some conclusions and conjecture about his personal story. For instance, we classified his personal story line into several parts: basic information, timeline (e.g. education background, intern experiences, travel footprint, volunteer experiences), relationship and personal interest.
"Free Cookies" Activity Poster
2 / Meet Y** F**
We invited Yii to have a private interview. This interview is designed to have three parts. In the first step, we showed him a PowerPoint to explain the purpose of our project, then he got a printout of his profile. While he read the profile, we set a camera to record his reaction and expression. Finally, we had a face- to- face talk and interviewed him with the topic of Internet privacy.
* For privacy protection, I would not upload any private files that include Y**F** to here.
What we have found after Y**’s interview and the whole searching procedure was that most users have little awareness about protecting their privacy when they using the Internet. It is necessary to strengthen the user consciousness. First, it is very common and normal for them to share the personal information online, displaying themselves’ daily life such as locations, relationship is becoming one of their socializing style. Secondly, the development of Internet products such as Google tend to have more power to arrange people’s life. That is to say, users may increasingly addict to this kind of convenience and became less concentrate on personal private space.
So what we had decided to do in our submission 2 is focusing the result we have got and keeping deeper discussion about how to represent the internet influence on people’s daily. We came up with an idea of short video and wanted to use a concept called “black man” to mimic the internet shadow. By reappearing scenes about how internet organize people’s life and even replace the humanity, we hope to enlighten audiences’ thinking about the appropriate use of internet, most importantly, to find out a better way to save our confidential from online experience.
3 / Conclusion
SHORT FILM: IN THE SHADOW OF PRIVACY
1 / Idea Introduction
The idea of this short film came from the interview with Y** F** (our prime respondent in our “Free Cookies” event). In the interview, Y** mentioned that he is a big fan of Google because of its numerous application services and the convenience it provides. However, he thought little about the security, or privacy when he was using Google services.
Most applications and websites are able to find out their users’ personal information and preferences by storing and calculating the data from the input of users. Some take it further and use these private information beyond what is necessary for the delivery of their services, even to the point of exchanging data with other companies for their own gain.
In order to engage more effectively with their users, companies may analyse the data that they collected from the users’ intentional and unintentional input. From the analysis they can build a better profile of the user and customise certain interactions to better suit the user’s needs.
If we were to apply the same process in the digital world to real life scenarios, what would happen? Would people still be willing to share so much of their personal information? These are the questions our group tries to explore, and that is why we decided to simulate how people use their applications.
Movie Poster
2 / Short Video
Thinking of your life, what is the difference between the present and the past. When you are typing, your phone knows your next word. When you are listening to music, the music player knows the song you like. When you are shopping online, your computer knows your size. Have you ever considered that your privacy has been violated when you are enjoying the convenience of digital devices. What if they are not inanimate devices, but human forms, who are familiar with all of your privacy, what will happen then?
3 / Story Explanation
We use the behaviour of shadow man to reflect some some related behaviour of privacy violations in our daily life. This part would explain all the meaning behind these behaviours.
Scene 1:
- Alex types “take medicine” on the memo, shadow man attaches a sticky note with medicine picture on it.
[Shadow man is a reflection of Alex’s personal electronic assistant who knows lots of detailed information of Alex. The action of shadow man attaches Alex’s memo on his body means he obtains the information of Alex’s memo.]
Scene 3:
- Shadow man comes with all the emails of Alex. He begins to classify the emails into different groups (e.g major, social life, ad, spam...)
[The behaviour of shadow man here is to imitate the Gmail category, which always divides email into different groups automatically.]
- ( Foreshadowing) Shadow man throws an important email into the trash.
[This behaviour reflects that sometime email box makes mistakes and moves some important email into the trash category. ]
Scene 4:
- Shadow man comes closer to Alex, he robs the laptop from Alex’s hands and begins to help Alex to type his information to the website.
[Imitate Chrome Browser “automatically filled in” function.]
Scene 5:
- Alex walks on the street, and shadow man follows behind him.
[This scene implies that the “Shadow man” is following your behaviour all the time.]
Scene 6:
- When he opens a website, the shadow man shows up with the bra he bought last time.
[This show-up of shadow man reflects the pop-up advertisement when people are browsing some website.]
EXHIBITION
At first, it is only about the video. Later we find that only a video does not go far enough. Since it is somehow a fictional video, it will be a little bit abstract to the audiences. To make our audiences have a better understanding of the video, we decided to make it into an exhibition. The exhibition consists of several parts. A small literal game is a warm-up to give the audience a rough idea of the topic of our exhibition. After the video, corresponding activities help the audience to introspect their own lives and also shorten the distance with the audience. At the same time, Free Cookie activity and its follow-up are introduced in the exhibition. People who attended Free Cookie Event are also invited to the exhibition as well. This does not only attract more people to visit the exhibition, but also maintains the continuity of our course. The outcome shows that what we have done is a great choice.
1 / Propaganda
Send invitation Emails
We have two versions of inviting emails: one is for public, the other is for people who have participated in our “ Cookie exchange” activity in front of the Main Library. We want to get feedbacks from that people and to see the changes may be happened about their thoughts of privacy and public.
Post event on Facebook page
We posted an event introduction and announcement on the public page of Facebook, and invite friends to attend to our exhibition.
Link to Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/PublicConfidential
Link to event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/801493533232491/
2 / Activities of Exhibition
Location:
Soundlab 1st Floor, Alison House, 12 Nicolson Square, Edinburgh EH8 9DF
Date:
6:30PM - 10:00PM, 02 April 2015
Session:
The exhibition consists of 5 parts. It starts and ends at the same place and is a linear visit process. To get a higher visiting efficiency and compact pace, there is always one guide all in black to lead visitors through the whole exhibition as one show. Ecah show lasts approximately 20 minutes.What’s more, each member is also responsible to explain the detail of each part.
Basic information & Preparation
Black suit & Mask
All of our group members are dressed in black and wear masks to match the mood of the exhibition.
Ticket
Since more people may come to our exhibition, we prepare the tickets and make sure that they could visit the exhibition in order.
As it turns out, the tickets help a lot during the exhibition. There are 58(or more) people attending our exhibition.
Public and Private Board
Due to the fixed length of show, we use this board to tell people who are waiting for our exhibition the inner situation. Private means that the show is going on and you can get in now. It is private now. Public means that the next show is coming, and you can come in now. It is public.
Exhibition Part 1: WordBoners
After the submission 2 shooting, our group wanted to include a few related interactive exercises into the exhibition, in order to engage better with the audience and encourage thoughts on privacy and safety. Originally we planned to have some keywords relating to privacy on a board, but we wanted to have more interaction between the audience and the keywords. Therefore we searched on the Internet for creative activities and came across some interesting “wordboners”. Following the idea and format of these we designed short expressions/phrases or sentences captures elements of privacy in illustrative typographies.
e.g. Twitter Amazon Facebook Vine Instagram Linkedin Whatsapp Skype → Take risk
In this Information Age, more and more people use multiple social media accounts; most of us enjoy the user experiences that are provided by these sites/applications. However, users may never think about what affect these has on them; what social media provides them with and what they take at the same time. We have seen numerous news articles on individuals or the general public being spied on or offended by others on social media. Thus we probably need to think about our privacy when we use them.
Exhibition Part 2: Short Movie
Exhibition Part 3: Your Shadow Man
Think back, you will find that your life is full of shadow men. They pry your privacy and secrets. They organize and manage everything for the best without making a sound. Do you know how your Shadow men work? Stand here and watch what happens around you.
With 3 projectors, the shadow men are alive on the wall. They are doing different things on the wall, giving visitors a shocking experience.
More information about short movie can be found above.
CONCLUSION
1 / Audience reaction
Most of the audiences enjoyed taking part in our exhibition and they especially liked the idea of “The Shadow of Privacy” video and the Yii foong Tien’s reaction video. They mentioned that both of these two parts showed direct and strong ideas, which made them to think about their own behaviours and actions in the digital world.
2 / Audience feedbacks
- It would be better to divide the whole exhibition into two parts (separated in two rooms).
- One part for movie projection, the other part for the discussion.
- Be more resourceful with the appliances, such as reducing the number of projectors from 3 to 1.
- The video should be runned completely.
3 / Self-evaluation
Through the exhibition we gain plenty of feedbacks from the audience, we found that certain parts in our exhibition can be a little better, such as better usage of exhibition space and distribution of tasks, more resourceful use of appliances, and making sure the video runs fine completely. Nevertheless, the general feedback provided by the attendants suggests that the exhibition was well thought-out, planned and conducted with great care. All of this sums up a successful event demonstrated by the great turnout of attendants, many of which commented on the effective advertising that attracted their interest.
