“Karen, an App That Knows You All Too Well”
“Karen is a fictional coach in a software-driven experiential art piece. Part story, part game, designed to be played over a period of days, it offers a deliberately unsettling experience that’s intended to make us question the way we bare ourselves to a digital device…
The dynamic that unfolds is somewhat reminiscent of “Her,” the 2013 Spike Jonze film in which Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love with an operating system. With Karen, however, it’s not the user but the app that starts exhibiting inappropriate behavior. “She develops a kind of friend crush,” Mr. Adams said. “And over the next 10 days or so, she feeds back to you things she’s learning about you — including some things you’re not quite sure how she knows or why.”…
Karen, like “Desert Rain” and “Ulrike and Eamon Compliant,” was developed with support from the University of Nottingham’s Mixed Reality Lab, which looks at how digital technologies can affect everyday life. The lab investigates such matters as the nature of online consent — a project that, using a standard readability test, recently found Google’s terms of service to be slightly harder to comprehend than “Beowulf” — and the role of personal data in constructing online identities.”
I sort of want to experience this. Would probably give me a proper level of concern about providing an app with hella information about me.
