A couple of months ago, 24-year-old Austrian law student Max Schrems requested Facebook for all his personal data. The European arm of Facebook, based in Dublin, Ireland, was obliged to turn over this information, as they had to follow an European law that requires any entity to provide full access to data about an individual, should this individual personally request for it.Perhaps a few pages of lame status messages, you might think. Well, guess again:
Berlin-based newspaper taz.de decided to visualize [taz.de] different aspects of this data: the magnitude of the 1.222 unique pages, the exact times Max logged in and wrote messages, the times of day messages he sent or received, Max's friend network, the locations of the pictures he took in Vienna, and the most popular tags of Max's messages. While the visualizations by themselves might not stand out, they do reveal the huge amount of digital traces one leaves, even when they were originally purposively 'deleted' or discarded.That is right--even when intentionally deleted or discarded!
Scared yet? If not, what is wrong with you? :)
1 comment:
Oh well; If Big Brother wanted to know that I post a lot of garbage, that I am spending too much time in front of my computer, that I am on it when I should be sleeping, that I have precisely 4 friends, that I lead such an exciting life that the only two places I am ever in are work and home, that my camera is broken and should have been replaced 5 years ago, he is very welcome :):):)
Seriously, few people realise how much of an open book they are. Perhaps a pointer to why we should lead a life as if it was an open book and not do anything that we would be embarassed with if it make the front pages.
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