Clear Your Tracks
https://www.clearyourtracks.org/
Where we spend time reveals a lot about who we are and what we like. We would be unsettled if we suspected people were watching or following us, however we frequently give access to our location to digital services and apps. Why is it that most people seem to feel so differently about forgoing this privacy in a digital context? We clearly get a benefit from sharing our location with services like phone map apps but does that fully explain how easily we give up our location information?
To explain this contradiction, our starting hypothesis is that most people don’t know how pervasively their location data is collected and, even if they do know, they don't have access to information about how to curtail its collection. This was the seed for our prototype Clear Your Tracks, an engaging illustration-driven website built for non-technical people that quickly sets out how your mobile phone can reveal your location and what actions you can take to reduce data collection.
Gap in the market
There is a growing awareness of how social media platforms and websites collect information about our online habits. There are books and documentaries which help to raise these practices to a broader audience, as well as browser plugins that have been designed to reduce the amount of tracking. However, we were not able to find similar straight forward resources which applied to tracking in the real world. There are some broad resources which cover the issues in addition to broader online tracking (Data Detox Toolkit) and some very specific resources for activists (Surveillance Self-Defence) but nothing specifically for the everyday owner of a smartphone.
Clear Your Tracks
So we decided to prototype resources, which we call Clear Your Tracks, supported by a grant from the Benchmark Initiative, a programme run by Geovation and funded by PlaceFund. The aim of Clear Your Tracks is to empower people with straightforward information about how their location data is collected by their mobile phone and what they can do to reduce the amount of data collected.
Clear Your Tracks introduces people to Ali, our main protagonist, who we then follow during a typical journey, showing people how different technologies interact with her mobile phone to collect her location.
The experience ends with a short section showing how people can make changes to reduce the amount of data collected in each of the scenarios.
We built Clear Your Tracks following a user-centred approach, building low-fidelity prototypes and testing early with our target user group of users with base-level technical understanding. Clear Your Tracks is a collaboration between Emerging Field and Twigged. We brought together a team composed of a UX designer, an illustrator and a developer.
Next steps
Although the website is just a prototype we hope that people find Clear Your Tracks useful - please do share it with those who might be interested.
If you’d like to discuss how Emerging Field and Twigged might help to bring transparency to your technical area please get in touch with us on info@emergingfield.co.uk.