A new game seeks to get Dubliners to think about who is tracking them online

One profile that Iva-Nicole Mavrlja and colleagues came across while researching the world of data-brokers was “young in tech”. 

“It was actually collected data from young people who might be working in IT in Dublin,” says Mavrlja, a PhD researcher at the Adapt Centre at Maynooth University. 

Exactly what data fed in to create the “young in tech” profile is a mystery, she says. 

“That's the kind of, I think, interesting part about data brokers,” says Mavrlja. “We often don't know what data points they do collect to make those decisions.”

It could include people with a Docklands workplace saved on Google Maps, or it could draw on what they have browsed and bought online, she says. 

That’s just an educated guess – based on how these profiles are created generally by data brokers, who hoover up the crumbs of data that people leave behind as they engage online and even from public records, combine it all and use it to infer habits and behaviours – and sell it on.

Those who buy those profiles to help target an audience or group may include businesses looking to hawk products, governments, law enforcement and private security companies, she says.

Parcels of data used to create profiles have usually been anonymised – although not always that well, as RTÉ showed recently – before they are sold on, she says. “So a lot of people think, you know, it’s not necessarily worrying.”

But even anonymised, they can have an impact, she says.

Indeed, these profiles are never going to be exactly accurate for each and every one of us, says Karl Toomey, a designer with the agency Wove, and a lecturer at the National College of Art and Design (NCAD). “We're complicated human beings.” 

“But increasingly, they're going to mediate and dictate the digital world that you're going to have access to,” he says.

Getting people to pause and think about this was the motivation for a new online game created recently by Toomey, Mavrlja and a wider team including NCAD students. 

The simple game, Who Do They Think You Are?, leads a player through five questions to reveal the inferences a data-broker may be making as they gather and resell the data that everybody leaves scattered through the day – and how that might be used to manipulate you.

The game is one of a bunch of initiatives put together by the Adapt Centre and Wove, with funding from Research Ireland Science Week, says Toomey. 

There are also free exhibitions on at the Digital Hub, on Thomas Street, from Friday to Sunday, hosted as part of this year’s Beta Festival, he said – one interactive, and the other showing how NCAD students foresee the possible future of data profiling.

What is the game?

Toomey got involved in the project after last year’s Beta Festival, a series of events around art and technology in the Liberties.

He went along to a think-in on facial recognition technology in policing. Afterwards, inspired, he reached out to one of the organisers, Emma Clarke, from the Adapt Centre, he says.

They applied for funding to create ways to make data-tracking and surveillance more understandable, he says.

The game Who Do They Think You Are? starts with panels introducing the idea of data brokers who buy up personal data and sell it on to advertisers, political parties and scammers.

It invites the player to follow one person’s fictional day and discover what data brokers can learn from just a few simple decisions – how we act once our alarm has gone off each morning, or what we do if we start to feel unwell.

It ends with the “reveal” of what profile the player has been allocated to, by a fictitious data broker.

Among those profiles is the “anxious researcher”. Their anxiety is a monetisable asset, it warns. They are ripe for strategies of fear-based marketing for warranties, it says.

They can be served with inflated prices when they return to webpages they have already visited – because the fact that they have come back shows that they are ready to buy, it also notes.

Another profile is “the autopilot”. Data brokers see them as an “ideal target for slow, gradual value erosion and profitable automatic renewals”. 

Subscription services will slowly raise prices counting on their lack of attention, and loyalty programmes will quietly devalue points and rewards.

These dummy profiles in the game are simple, says Toomey.

They’re built, after all, on data from five questions, rather than the thousands of points collected about someone over time online, he says. “I would say the profiles that are real are far creepier.”

A resource pack at the end of the game links to popular sources from around the world to learn more about data-brokering – including a John Oliver segment about profiles used for targeting in the United States.

Data brokers have created groups such as  “desperate and broke” or “rural and barely making it”, says Toomey.

One link directs the reader towards debate around the American airline Delta’s recent announcement that it would use AI to determine more of its pricing.

That’s a policy that has led to elevated concerns about personalised pricing or “surveillance pricing”, whereby people are charged different amounts for the same flight based on what data tells the airline about their past behaviour. 

The game also closes out with privacy tips.

Mavrlja said she hopes that the game spreads awareness of how digital data from mundane online activities – scrolling social media and shopping and searching – is sold for profit to data brokers and third parties.

Toomey says the game is a way to start to get people to think as they travel around the online world, and okay cookies. 

“It might seem innocuous,” he says. “But I think this is about having an awareness that that stuff is getting measured.”

For Toomey, global politics is also a wake-up call, he says. 

Tech giants have shown themselves willing to bend whichever way the political wind is blowing, says Toomey. 

“Then, you’re kind of like, oh God,” he says, “they have psychological profiles of society on mass. You know, that just doesn't sit easy with me.”