Raw Thoughts of a UX designer — Act Two — Christmas special.

“Mom, do you think Santa knows that I have been good this year?” , “Of course honey, he will bring you a lot of gifts this Christmas !”.

Today I want to talk about Santa. This Christmas legend that made us wait impatiently for this festive season as kids, had a superpower that fascinated me back in my youth…

The power of knowing who has been good or naughty and determine how many gifts they shall get! Thinking about it, made me realize that Santa is a Data analyst…

This marvelous jolly man was collecting freely all of our Data and peeking into our lives all year long. However, if he was real, today in 2018, all of us would have witnessed the arrest of Santa, once the GDPR regulation was implemented. Sad huh?

2018 was the year of DATA, it is a hot topic this year, many people have started to demonize it and fearing that, if in the wrong hands it would trigger a worldwide dictatorship worthy of a Georges Orwell novel.

Being watched over, is something that nobody want and yet they have just started to realize that their privacy is at stake.

But the question we have to ask ourselves…what is privacy? And why is it so important? I personally don’t care if everyone knows that I am in my living room, watching a cheesy movie, in my mickey mouse pajamas with pizza that I ordered on Uber-eats…Really… Who’s going to try to blackmail me with these kinds of informations?

Thus to evaluate the importance of privacy I listed the things that could put anyone into trouble and ruin his/her life:

• Bank account informations (losing all your money)
• Passport or ID informations (identity theft)
• Weird google searches (We’ve all been there.)
• Nudes (public shaming and subject to blackmailing)
• Fiscal frauds (if they have some)
• Illicit online activities. (Such as cat-fishing, child pornography, bullying, stalking etc…)
• Lies.
• Basically everything that anyone shouldn’t do.

Now aside from Bank informations passeport/IDs information and Weird google searches, are we going to realize that everything people try to hide is mainly, shameful, bad or illegal stuff?

To me it all makes sense when people get super scared about their privacy, they’re probably hiding things.

Now, now, back to the main topic, Santa. We were all okay that an old bearded white man with a jolly belly watched everything we did and determined if we deserve gifts or not. But when it is about the government or huge corporations we’re suddenly scared that it would turn into a scenario out of science fiction? I think we watched a lot of black mirror.

I am no expert in the debate of data privacy since it’s a very broad subject that can be debated for hours, but my point is, our data is really insignificant and inoffensive to us as long as we don’t do anything illegal that could ruin our lives.

The only important thing is protecting our bank informations and our passeports / IDs. Don’t forget we’re over 8 billions humans on this planet I don’t think someone other than an algorithm will go over every person data to find stuff that could blackmail him or her.

Moreover, data collection could allow humanity to achieve world peace. We can spot the terrorists before they commit their massacres, we can stop drugs smugglers destroying the lives of millions, we can arrest pedophiles before they molest your children, we can ban bullies from online platforms before they hurt anyone. We can do a lot to prevent disaster and give better lives to millions. But, in order to do that, we need to solve our trust issues.

If we were capable of trusting Santa, a fictional character, who encouraged us to be good, I think we can do the same for government and corporations. Why do you think children are the happiest and greatest beings in the world? Simply because they are encouraged by a myth like Santa to be good. Now as adult I think being watched over would encourage everyone to be good and make the world a better place.

Until then,

Keep trusting Santa!

Merry Christmas.