Edward Snowden's leaked details of top-secret US and British government mass surveillance programs has given the global public an indication of how much personal data is being collected. Unfortunately, it's not governments alone who are into personal data collection. Businesses from Google to Facebook to Amazon.com are gobbling up personal data, most often with the permission of the users of their resources. If you're spending with a credit card, sending a Tweet or finding out WhatsApp, your data is being collected, correlated and perhaps sold or secretly subpoenaed. Data Dealer (www.datadealer.com) is an online browser game focused on collecting and selling personal data. It´s about surveillance, privacy, the social impact of technology and fun. What if you had control over millions of Internet users' personal data? Ever wanted to run your own “Smoogle & Tracebook,” track your users and ruthlessly and collect loads of detailed personal profiles? Through Data Dealer you can do just that. “The problem is today that the surveillance which is happening by private companies in Europe and the USA goes very far,” said Wolfie Christl, Data Dealer's co-creator, in an interview from his base in Vienna, Austria. “Private companies are tracking all the details of our life. Every click and everything we do is being recorded. There are companies such as banks, insurance companies and the human resource departments of companies who would pay to have access to all this kind of data. Now we can clearly see too that personal information collected by private companies may be shared with government agencies. The public doesn't understand that they don't control the way their data is being used and in some cases sold. Our game aims to raise awareness of that. It answers questions such as, ‘Who is collecting all this personal data' and “What could be the implications of this for me?'” In June, Games for Change announced that Data Dealer had won the category, “Most Significant Impact.” Christl said that the jury members had told him that after they played the online demo of the game, they would think back to the experience every time the question came up on the screen of a digital device asking for permission to access personal information such as an address book. The Data Dealer team began working on the game in 2011 without any funding outside their own pockets. Last year, funding from the Austrian government and a private foundation helped them to reach the 80 percent point in developing the full online multiplayer version. A Kickstarter campaign, which successfully reached its funding goal last week, has provided the money to enable the developers to finish the game and take it live in October. “It's interesting that just as we are about to launch our game, there is a debate in Austria at the moment. It seems that there is a contract between the Austrian police and the NSA about the sharing of information,” Christl explained. “The Austrian government is not a single institution and there are different stakeholders with very different opinions. So our project to highlight the issues associated with the collection and sharing of personal information is being funded by the Education Ministry in the Austrian Government at the same time another government ministry is participating with the NSA in such data gathering and sharing.”
In October when Data Dealer goes live, that won't be the end of the project. The team will still need to secure funding to finance the game's continuing development and support its infrastructure. “We think it will be possible because so many people and organizations are now interested in what we're doing,” concluded Christl. Play the demo through www.datadealer.com or in a lovely bit of irony, you can follow the team on Tracebook, oops we mean Facebook, at https://www.facebook.com/datadealer
