Tech research and ethics, data visualization, UX/UI design, and writing professional.
As finalists for the NYC Media Lab & Consumer Reports Data Privacy Challenge, my team Data Ctrl created a website and chatbot prototype to provide users with holistic information on the ramifications of their data agreements.
I was responsible for the content side of this project, conducting user research, categorizing information, and writing copy.
Created in collaboration with Sohee Cho, Bhavya Gupta, Jason Li, and Rosa Ng
Right now, it is too complicated to keep track of our personal policies across many different sites. We wanted to consolidate it to a single location for our users. Our online chatbot would keep track of your privacy preferences and show you how they are applied across multiple websites.
We wanted to understand how people felt about this process, so we surveyed a number of people within our academic cohort. We tracked mean and mode responses on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is a strong disagreement and 5 is strong agreement.
Even among our skeptical cohort, we found diversity in responses. There are places where people believe that data use is good and beneficial to them and places where they definitely reject it. The current model of accepting and declining wholesale is not able to get at this level of complexity. We also found a gap between what people wanted control over and what was being provided by companies.
There needs to be a dialogue between user and service to clarify what happens to the data. We wrote content and designed the user interface for Deecee, a chatbot that would ask the user their comfort levels with different privacy settings, and explain what changing them would mean. We designed a more welcoming conversation to introduce audiences to the concepts of information privacy and what it means to accept the terms.
We also wrote and designed an educational page with some introductory information about how privacy policies are set up and how companies use your data.
Our hope for the future would be to build the backend of this product and figure out how to connect it to third-party websites so that users can actually seamlessly update their preferences.