Privacy Pixels

If a stranger came up to you on the street, would you give him your picture? Probably not.Yet people often dole out all kinds of personal information on the Internet. Services like Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter and Flickr are oceans of personal minutiae — birthday greetings sent and received, school and work gossip, photos of family vacations, and movies watched. Computer scientists and policy experts say that such seemingly innocuous bits of self-revelation can increasingly be collected and reassembled by computers to help create a picture of a person’s identity, sometimes down to the Social Security number. I am trying to portray this through ‘Privacy Pixels’.

Using a server side script, profile pictures of random people from facebook are fetched. These pictures are then used in constructing the ‘Privacy Pixels’. The music was composed using Fruity Loops.

Note: Facebook allows anyone (may not be your facebook friend) to fetch your profile picture in four different sizes. There is no privacy settings to disable this.

Privacy Pixels in Large Canvas: