Keeping a Track

My personal data gathered through Facebook’s invisible form of surveillance (Off-Facebook Activity Tool) and translate it into visible forms of Data Visualizations by creating an interactive web-experience showcasing the same.

Year

2020

Project Type

Data Visualization

Skillset - (rename

UI/UX Design

Prototyping

Figma

Taking inspiration from the Panopticon, an 18th-century architectural design by Jeremy Bentham, wherein the principle is central inspection. The parallels between the panopticon and CCTV may be obvious, but what happens when you step into the world of digital surveillance and data capture? Are we still “objects of information” as we swipe between cells on our smartphone screens?

01 / Internet
Surveillance Camera

Facebook has an advertising tool known as Facebook Pixel which is installed on millions of websites and it collects and sends the information back to Facebook. It can tell practically everything about a user such as how long they were on the website, what they were browsing through and if they put something in their cart or not.

They get to know the users’ preferences, interests, likes and online activity through which they can provide personalised advertisements to them.

02 / Narrowing Down

03 / Collecting My Facebook Data

The thought of finding out what information Facebook has on me was very intriguing.

What all does it know about me?

Curious and interested in findingout about my data, I set on to download my Facebook Data

04 / Off-Facebook Activity

When I discovered my data and saw the abundance of information Facebook had on me, it gave me actual chills. I did not question the “how” anymore because I understood that different organisations and businesses share this information with them using the Facebook Business Tools but instead I was questioning the “why”.

‘Why does Facebook have this information about me?’ ‘Why does it care what I browse on my phone?’ To show me personalised advertisements? Was this the reason for Facebook to know so much about me and my interests, lifestyle, likes and dislikes?

05 / Facebook App Event Tracking

Facebook has made several business tools for organisations and companies to use in order to gather data. One such option within the tool is Facebook App Event Tracking that allows the organisation/business to track actions (of the user) in their mobile app or web page such as app installs and purchase events.

By tracking these events they can view analytics, measure ad performance and build audiences for ad targeting.

There are mainly three types of App Events:

1. Automatically Logged Events - The Facebook SDK (Software Development Kit) automatically logs app installs, app sessions, and in-app purchases.

2. Standard Events - Popular events that Facebook has created for the businesses.

3. Custom Events - Events the businesses/organisations create that are specific to their app.

06 / Dataset

Dineout

Big basket

theguardian.com

Dots & Co.

Conde Nast

Trip Advisor

Zomato

Tennis Clash

Paytm Insider

Shein

Co-star personalised astrology

Mario Kart

interaction-design.org

Book My Show

07 / Visual Explorations

Exploring different visual elements be it shape, colour or the size for my visualizations, I thoroughly enjoyed this process. I started off with some water colours, brush and paper as I wanted to try different variations without being scared. After a few tries, I shifted to the digital platform and started to explore on Figma.

I began with a simple x and y axis visualizations, using two different colours and shapes. As and when I was exploring this I realised that not having even a single element similar was causing a lot of confusion. I stuck to one shape, which was the dot, and continued exploring different colours.