start

The data set that this project is based on is “how much personal information a user is willing to give up under pressure in exchange for convenience?”, the larger question being “how much of yourself are you willing to trade for convinience?”

This project is reflective of how many hoops and bounds users must go through to access even the most basic content online. We receive countless pop-ups every day, to accept cookies (and re-accept cookies), to subscribe to mailing lists, to see what other people are buying at the same time as you, to ask you again to subscribe to the mailing list, to ask for your location… We click through them mindlessly to get to the content we want, without considering the fact that many of these pop-ups are extracting pieces of our information each time.

Our project "hacks" this data set by presenting users with questions requesting personal information that go beyond just age/location/tracking/etc., barraging users with questions about their deepest fears, feelings, and regrets. Presenting users with these types of questions forces them to confront how easily, and how often, they give away pieces of themselves throughout their day-to-day use of the internet.

This project is also reflective of the “meditation” apps that interrupt users’ ability to use certain apps/websites and force them to reflect/breathe/meditate instead of continuing to their desired content. This project subverts this trope by interrupting users’ experience by forcing users to reflect on not so meditative subjects- exposing how emotional data is gathered in impersonal ways.