User:Kadeuri

Gamification

At this very moment I’m reading a piece that’s called ‘You do have something to hide’ from De Correspondent, a online collective which writes articles about relevant subjects. The book is about data collectors, that reach from Google and Facebook to businesses you didn’t even knew existed. Everyone owns a laptop, smartphone or most likely, both. We know how our devices work and seem to do more and more with it. We think we have all our files and data secured by the companies that produce our devices and trust them. In some way we do know that our data is shared with other companies so they can, in their best way, provide us with ads, which is how most platforms earn their money. The truth is very different. All this data sharing, which our devices do automatically due to algorithms, is far from our consciousness. It’s something we can’t see, feel and in some way don’t want to see. If we would know the truth about the facts we probably wouldn’t use those devices. But thinking about living without all the platforms we now a days use is unthinkable. No one is willing to boycot Facebook, because besides the data sharing and ads it gives us convenience, a way to share our lives with friends. The authors of the book went in to a research project of 3 years and found out that there’s a unthinkable huge market for our personal data. They not only know about our online life, but claim to know a lot about our offline life as well. Through our smartphones, these companies are able to see where we are, life, eat, sleep, park etc. They’re constantly sharing information about us with other companies, which share our information again and again. This is data that once it’s shared will never be deleted from the internet, once you shared that picture of your cat on Facebook, it’ll be on the internet somewhere forever. Personally I found this very shocking, because I myself never thought about this, which is very naive. Our devices are totally based on trust from their customers, but in fact they are a easy way for companies to reach us and get hold of our lives, in a way. The thing that gets hold of me most is the fact that so little people know about this while there are so many users. My goal with this project is to reach people in game that’s fun and at the same time teach people about this fast changing world of data. I think it’s important for people to know about these facts, because it’s part of our daily lives which we tend to overlook.