That's the question behind the new Chrome extension Data Selfie. Created by developers Hang Do Thi Duc and Regina Flores Mir, the application gives users a peek into what kind of digital footprint they might be leaving behind as they browse Facebook—and makes the hidden mechanisms of Facebook's data collection more transparent. [...]
The different sections of the data selfie are arranged in tiles, each related to specific information about you: your political orientation, religious affiliation, and your relationship to things in the world. Open up the app, and you see your activity on the site by date and time, with small, color-coded crosses indicating that you looked, liked, clicked a link, or typed. Scroll down and it shows you your 10 top friends and 10 top pages based on time engaged with their posts, as well as your top likes. Then it shows you two lists, one of "keywords," which are defined as general topics in the content you looked at, and "entities," defined as people, organizations, and things in the content you looked at. Both are rated in terms of their relevance to you and your positive or negative sentiment toward them. [...]
For Do Thi Duc, the lack of control over her information that Data Selfie made clear was deeply unsettling and gave her a feeling a helplessness—because even if you can see (and delete) data when you're tracking it through the app, you can't escape the nagging feeling that Facebook has such a large amount of data that you can't control. After working on Data Selfie for a year, she now severely limits her time on Facebook and Google, hops from browser to browser, and relies on VPNs for more privacy. Her concerns about digital privacy are related to her background: Do Thi Duc was born in east Germany, where she says that fear over lack of control over personal information is still common. "Historically here in Germany, a lot of people are afraid of the prospect of the wrong people having your information," she says. "There’s a sense, in Europe, that we don’t know what will happen because things have happened in the past."
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