Before coming to Emily Carr, for my masters I used to work as a graphic designer for a mobile marketing startup in India. Design for me in general has always been a tool to communicate something to its viewers and users. During the reading seminar course in the Fall of 2020, I read ‘Ethics of Design’ by Clive Dilnot. In this reading Dilnot writes about how there are certain ethics that should be considered by designers while designing ‘solutions’ to world problems. In the text he focuses on how poorly designed solutions lead to new problems and more design solutions.
Interestingly, around the same time, WhatsApp had been taken over by Facebook and was undergoing some privacy policy changes. One of these changes, allowed WhatsApp to share more user data including private messages of users with Facebook. This led to a widespread backlash from confused users, resulting in various legal challenges and regulatory investigations. Users immediately started moving to alternative messaging platforms. The effect was such that WhatsApp lost more than a million users in just a couple of weeks.
This incident with WhatsApp, validated the fact that how much people cared about their privacy on the internet. Being a communication designer, I wanted to explore, how could design bring transparency to users on how their data is used, once it is shared by agreeing to consent forms. Meanwhile, WhatsApp had introduced visual cards on the app to explain the new policy changes to users, to revive from the user loss. It worked for the messaging platform, and they were able to get back their users.
After doing some further research, I realized that we interact with data all the time. With our smartphones, computers, and other gadgets. There is certain data that we give out with consent to access certain services, but we do not realize that there is a lot of other data that can be inferred from the former data to make predictions about us. When you have access to so much data about someone, it is easy to make predictions about their behavior or even change it gradually and there is a good chance of that prediction being true.
Through my research, I want to explore how information design can make this hidden layer of ethics in data sharing accessible to users, so that they can understand how their data and actions shape the internet, and affect their lives and of those around them.