What is Data Privacy?
Data privacy relates to how a piece of information — or data — should be handled based on its relative importance. For instance, you likely wouldn’t mind sharing your name with a stranger in the process of introducing yourself, but there’s other information you wouldn’t share, like your bank account information or passwords.
In our current digital age, a lot of information and metrics are collected about us, than we realize. Companies today, in a push for innovation and to maintain an edge over thier competitors, analyze, mine, and track virtually everything we do.
These metrics can be as simple as our names, emails, and date of births, or as personal as our likes, wants, interests, and desires. Whether you actively realize this or not, chances are your platforms know you better than your friends or even close family members.
The convoluted and obscure nature of data collection and tracking has enabled companies to amass data about everyone without any real oversight. With data now a more valuable commodity than gold, it's now more important than ever to take a strong stance on data privacy.
Why should I care? I’ve got nothing to hide.
There are two sets of reasons to care about your privacy even if you’ve got nothing to hide—ideological reasons and practical reasons. Ideologically, privacy is a right that we haven't always had. Just like the right to freedom of speech, generations before ours have fought for our right to privacy. Now, it’s a human right.
Having nothing to hide is not true nor realistic. Don’t confuse privacy with secrecy. Everyone knows what you do in the bathroom, yet you still close the door. That’s because you want privacy, not secrecy. Just like you have a passcode for your phone, and passwords for your email because you don’t want people reading your personal messages.
Practically, especially, information in the wrong hands becomes dangerous. You might be okay with governments or security agencies having your private information. You might even trust Google or Facebook. But what if these get hacked and your information now falls in the wrong hands? What would your information make you vulnerable to? (See Yahoo or Ashley Madison). You also can’t predict the future. Right now you may not have a lot to risk, but what about 30 or 40 years from now? If Sony’s hacking has told us anything, is that your private information has an impact on your life. Amy Pascal, co-chairman of the company, lost her job because of it.
Your private life out of context becomes a weapon. We’ve all joked about things we consider sensitive. But, among friends, it’s something we all do. In fact, our behavior changes depending on the people we’re with. Someone could easily find something offensive you said in a group chat that you have with your closest friends. Because they’re your friends and it was a joke or a sarcastic remark. But take it out of context and it is no longer a joke.
Your information has value. A company like Facebook or Google allows you to upload unlimited data to their servers, for free. What’s their business model? How do they make so much money? They sell your info to advertising companies and data brokers. But they never asked you if you wanted to sell your information. If someone asked you, in person, 100 questions about your personal life with the intent of selling the information, would you answer them? Probably not, right? But you let this happen every time you use a service that makes money selling your info.
With the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic forcing people to stay home, work from home, and now spend more time on their digital devices than ever before, it becomes imperative to talk about why privacy matters. As schools and businesses transitioned to conduct classes and meetings on the popular video conferencing app, Zoom, little did they know that their data was also being shared with Facebook, regardless of whether they were Facebook users or not. When caught publicly, Zoom quickly reversed the code to stop sharing data with Facebook. As we increasingly become more and more dependent on these technologies, we must ask ourselves about the tradeoffs we’re making by using these services. It is why it’s important to care and demand oversight change on a industry-wide level.
Generate your Data Portrait →
Your data portrait helps you understand your data footprint at a glance. It works by mapping your data to your profile image. The more visible you are in your portrait, the more data companies have on you. Alternatively, the less visible you are in your portrait, the more you are hidden on the internet.
To get started, request your data from the different platforms you use. This can take up to 2-3 days. Once you have your data, return to this page and drop the data here. Be sure to follow the instructions in preparing your data for analysis. Your data card will then be generated, which contains your portrait, as well as some more info.
Disclaimer: Your data isn't uploaded anywhere. All processes are done locally, on your machine. If you feel more comfortable, you can turn off your internet before you upload your data.
This feature is not available on mobile. Please access this site on desktop.
Drag & drop your data here, or click to archive
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Your Data Portrait.
@hello_shiv
11/15 7:05 PM
What's Data Privacy?
Data Privacy relates to how a piece of information—or data—should be handled based on its relative importance. For instance, you likely wouldn’t mind sharing your name with a stranger in the process of introducing yourself, but there’s other information you wouldn’t share, like your bank account information or passwords.
Take Action:
Feeling helpless and overwhelmed with a complex topic like Data Privacy can be easy, but don’t get complacent. Privacy isn’t a switch you can just turn on or off—it’s an ongoing battle that you’ll need to be always mindful of and demand change for.
Begin here: data-aeternum.com/
So what can I do?
Feeling helpless and overwhelmed with a complex topic like Data Privacy can be easy, but don’t get complacent. Privacy isn’t a switch you can just turn on or off — it’s an ongoing battle that you’ll need to be always mindful of, keep track of, and demand change for.
In the meantime, however, take your first steps to a stronger data privacy by reducing your data footprint, i.e. the amount of data you’re giving away willingly and unwillingly. It's not comprehensive, but it'll give you a easy nudge into starting to take your privacy more seriously.
The Data Aeternum Handbook provides essential context to the themes and topics that this website touches on.
Download the PDF or buy a physical book.
Further Resources
Here's a list of further readings and tools you can use to further your understanding about Data Privacy and Data Collection:
Why make this?
Let’s face it, Data Privacy is something you rarely think about, and in one sentence, that is it. Data Aeternum exists to educate and spread awareness about Data Privacy so that you can make conscious and informed decisions in your day-to-day internet activities. It does this by holistically collecting, curating, and humanizing information and technical knowledge that you need to know, while simultaneously empowering you with actionable tools and resources to reduce your data footprint.
We’re so often so concerned with the next big innovation, that we don’t stop to think about how it was even possible. Today’s technological innovations, especially in machine learning and artificial intelligence, are possible because of our data. It’s possible because we’re tracked at every single click, tap, and scroll, because our default settings leave us woefully exposed to the watchful eye, and because there’s no governmental oversight over what’s off-limits. If we don’t educate ourselves, educate others, and demand change, tomorrow’s technological innovations might come at an even greater cost.
Who made this?
Data Aeternum is a thesis project that is designed, written, and coded by Shivam Sinha , as part of the BFA Communication Design program at the Parsons School of Design. It’s designed for a universal at-risk audience of young adults, who aren’t aware of the dangers of profiling, and technology illiterate adults and seniors, who might be unaware of these practices. Though it’s designed as a thesis project, there’s a strong intention for this project to live outside the scope of it, functioning as a real-world tool that people can universally have access to, and benefit from.
Shivam is a designer and creative coder, currently based in New York City, mixing his passion for design and technology to make tools, products, and experiences that seek to alleviate and pragmatically improve products and services for all. You can learn more about Shivam, here.
Data Aeternum is an open-source project available to everyone free of cost. Please consider donating and contributing to this project so that it may continue to be available for everyone to utilize.