Project Thoughts : The Internet

The Internet and Engineering

Here is a list of ideas for the Internet project.

Most of these ideas revolve around the concepts, features, and parts of the Internet that are hidden, clandestine, or go unnoticed by most of the users.

Disposal of Personal Data

• Rebuild : Ephemeral Internet
  • A New Rule :
    Every content, packet that is delivered to another entity on the internet only belongs to the new owner, so sender is left with nothing, and the content is distributed among the “receivers” So we have a clear sense of who owns what data.
  • Fun activity : Send out pieces of random image on the internet to everybody -> Then from human interaction, we try to put the pieces together. (bringing back human interaction and a sense of community while forcing the disposal of data on the sender’s side).
• Data Shredder:
  • Destroy personal data on the internet “physically”
  • Inspirations from Shredder by Mark Napier
  • Not quite sure which personal data to play with. Perhaps a mixture of “shredder”(visual effect) and “friend-fracker“(concept) might be interesting?
• Maps : Where is our personal data physically stored?
  • Collect all the known data centers and plot them on google maps
  • (risky) We don’t know which companies rely on which data centers and research needs to be done to make this cool (probably over-scoped for this project)

Things that don’t Get Much Attention

• Terms and Conditions
  • Idea 1 : Present a fake app, while making the audience sign up for a service which includes a unusual and surprising terms and conditions. Shock people that nobody reads these conditions carefully enough (especially with the prevalence of OAuth these days)
  • Idea 2: Collage of Popular services and “interesting” excerpts from their terms and conditions. Collection of things usually deliver a powerful message.
• Ads Reversal
  • What if we reverse the contents? The contents that we were supposed to pay attention vs. things that we are expected to spend the least amount of time paying attention to (like terms and conditions, 404 Not Found, glitches).
    • A landing page with ads and terms and conditions reversed
    • A landing page where we can see how each Ad classified my personal data as..

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