For the first week of our final year, we started off by completing a group project. We had the choice to choose between a handful of different topics, those being**, Climate Change, Global Pandemics, Surveillance Capitalism, income inequality ,Disinformation/misinformation, homelessness, borders, immigration & refugees, AI, Gender equality, Inflation, Racial inequality, Energy crisis, War and AGI.**
As a group we decided to eventually pick Surveillance Capitalism.
Surveillance capitalism is when companies collect information about what people do online and what way they give away any personal data.
Some of the information that would be normally tracked from big companies like Meta and Google would be,
These things are tracked mainly because your own personal data can be valuable to companies. It helps them understand what you are interested in and how you behave online. Companies can then use this information that has been provided to personalise adverts or recommend products.
For the project, our group came up with the idea of having a product that is more honest about sharing data and how it is being portrayed online. With people being so used to their data being shared and not fully aware of how it is active instead we wanted users to be more comfortable sharing their data with the honesty and transparency approach.
From there we decided to make a browser extension tool called Swiper. Swiper aims to simplify these interactions by giving users a quick and accessible way to manage tracking, permissions and online advertising.
We also came up with a quick prototype to demonstrate to the rest of the class how the tool would be used if it were to be installed on your browser,
https://swiper-cookie-prototype.vercel.app/
