A media lab in The Netherlands is bringing attention to online privacy with humor by predicting the perfect birthday based on cached data.
Everybody Googles themselves once in awhile, but few people really have a handle on the depth, breadth and longevity of their online presence. It’s hard to keep track of what’s private and what’s not when so much of what you see and do online is saved for posterity. Old school websites, social networks, directories, listservs and bulletin boards never really go away – archives and caches live forever.
A media lab in The Netherlands is bringing attention to online privacy with humor.
For the past two years, Utrecht-based SETUP has been building a national database of Dutch citizens based exclusively on publicly accessible online data. It was initially conceived of as a National Birthday Calendar that would suggest custom birthday presents based on the data collected, but the information they found was so sensitive it was deemed illegal to complete the project.
SETUP gathered the information through six hackathons, scouring data from defunct websites, social networks and phone directories, gathering millions of details on Holland’s population of 16 million. “Even though we kind of expected it, when you see how much data you can find, and how easily you can scrape it, it’s still shocking,” said project leader Ellen Bijsterbosch.
Legal advisors warned them against traveling to a conference in the United States with an encrypted hard drive that contained the highly detailed personal profiles they assembled on more than 800,000 people, saying it would be a violation of Dutch privacy laws.
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