On our first day of final year we were given a group work task to get us warmed up and back into the swing of things. The task was to choose from a list of current world problems and try and find some sort of intervention for it. This list covered a lot of areas from cost of living, immigration, AI, and surveillance capitalism. In our group we decided to look at surveillance capitalism.
We started off by looking into surveillance capitalism and getting an understanding of what it actually is and what the world thinks of it. We created a spider diagram and noted down with sticky notes more about surveillance capitalism. We found the main ways that it is being done is by big tech companies called ‘dark horses’, and they use social media, web-browsers and other free applications that users input data into to collect, analyse, and monetise data. The main problem with this is that it is usually done without the user fully knowing or it being made explicitly clear what data is being collected.
To help tackle this, we came up with the idea of having a product that is totally honest about data and how it is being used. Because people are so used to their data being shared and not really knowing how it affects them, we want users to be refreshed with the honesty and transparency approach. As the idea came together we decided to make it a swiper tool that is a chrome extension. We gave it a fun identity by making it Swiper from Dora the Explorer. It will sit at the top of the browser to act as a reminder that it is there and to reassure the user that their data is being protected by Swiper. When cookies or a pop up comes up, Swiper will give the user the option to immediately swipe the cookies away.
Below is the prototype for our Swiper solution. What it does is summarise terms and conditions of cookies and actually tells the user honestly what is going on with their data. This creates transparency for the user and gives back control over their data, allowing them to select and de-select individual checkboxes for specific pieces of data.
https://swiper-cookie-prototype.vercel.app/
Todays exercise was a great way to get back into the flow of things and getting back into design thinking again. I think that we came up with a pretty good intervention for the issue of surveillance tracking, and enjoyed getting my brain ticking again.