Reading/Discussion: Privacy

The articles assigned for class brought up some interesting observations. The idea of wanting to share some withheld information, as opposed to the anxiety of having personal information shared with anyone takes the conversation to new alarming levels. Now, I’m not one to get paranoid over the compromises we make for technology and economy to do their thing, but every day more data is being created, and every day our systems become more reliant on that data. To what extent are we willing to compromise, and how can we comprehend the ways in which these economies of data harvesting affect us? As we have seen in another one of the readings, even if we understood how these systems affected us, in most cases, we don’t even have the option to opt out. But it is important to start getting people involved in the conversation, to let them know how this data harvesting can have a direct impact in the ways we live and our privacy. What better way to express these ideas that spatially? My installation for the class aims to showcase how one’s own presence in a space can spark a whole series of reactions. Of course, in this case the result would be a change in the environment of that space, but it might as well translate into the tactics of data harvesting.