Now more than ever, massive amounts of sensitive data across our connected devices are being used in ways that are often inconspicuous. As technology continues to intertwine with our lives, the need for privacy protecting initiatives must beat the forefront of designing for these systems. In the age of big data, it is critical for us to understand where our data goes, and why. Over a duration of 10 weeks me and my 2 teammates sought to understand where our data goes, why, and what we can do about it.
As UX designer over this 10-week project I delivered the following,
2019 Primer Conference – “Futures for all” Emerging Designer Exhibition Award – Honorable mention
The Economist
We started our secondary research on a quest to understand where this nonchalant mindset around our data stems from.
This nonchalant mindset seems to be a result of the lacking user centric design of these policies which are often riddled with language Incomprehensible to the average user.
We sent out a survey to get a general view of the current understanding of data and how it is being used and continued to conduct interviews with users.
We found users have little understanding of their rights and how to protect them. It is not uncommon for users to share the following: name, location, email, DOB , payment information, photos, contacts, thoughts, activities, and interests. Many users access the internet through a personal phone or tablet, this could mean they are often on the go when accessing internet making their information slightly more vulnerable.
With our insights in mind we contextualized key habits and pain points of our target population by creating personas and dummy data. This helped us to uncover our opportunity space.
In the age of the algorithm, innovation runs on big data. We deserve to understand what happens to our data. And who does what with it. Privacy is a right, and policies should always be transparent, so that no one risks their personal data for reasons they do not understand. Athena allows users of the internet to understand the value of their data through self reflection, and thus make informed decisions based on their own data analysis.
How? By introducing a browser extension, Athena is able to (with user permission) collect user data in realtime to form the algorithmic selfie which users can explore on our site. The Athena browser extension doubles a translator for hard to read policies.
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