One of the things that struck us was that people openly discussed feeling unsure about what happens with their data - who collects it, who sees it and whether it is sold without their consent. This prompted an idea to design a workshop that informed people about their data. Using a theme of James Bond, myself, Mia and Alia designed two activities to provide awareness about the consequences of sharing seemingly insignificant pieces of personal data.

The outline of the workshop that we ran can be found here.

The aim of the workshop was twofold - first, to understand the pieces of personal data that people prioritise in order of value; and second, we created a James Bond themed activity that required participants to identify the profile and location of an MI5 mole by using various bits of personal and contextual data that had been ‘leaked’. Essentially, it was a game of guess who (and where). We wanted to get people to think about the small but significant consequences of sharing their personal data - and in particular, how pieces of seemingly unrelated data can be matched to create assumptions (both good and bad I might add!)

It fits in with our ethics of data work - which can be read about here.

It was interesting to see the types of personal data that people valued the most (we had 45 items). The 5 most chosen pieces were: Passport ID, GP records, Messages and texts, Read-Content (online) and browsing history. It appeared to be particularly important for people to have control and privacy over their communication, as well as over what they read and browse online - at least for our 11 workshop participants.

Group members prioritising personal data

The experience of the workshop was great. Of the three groups within the workshop, one group cracked the who and where, one group worked out the where but not the who, and the other neither. We had interesting discussions about the context in which we share data, and how we can create assumptions about people based on pieces of data. For example, location time stamps, or ‘check ins’ might tell us whether a person is walking, running or in a car, especially when matched with their height information.

An example of the suspect list

Feedback was positive - people saw value in workshops of this kind to increase awareness of the data we share on an everyday basis. It wasn’t aimed to invoke fear - but rather a way to get people thinking about the potential consequences of sharing personal data. One of the participants suggested running this type of workshop for teenagers with their parents. Again to increase awareness, but also to encourage open discussion with their parents, who might have concerns about their online activities.

X marks the spot - the location of the 'Mole'!

Our experience of Mozfest was fascinating - it was great to be able to chat about personal data with a group of both interesting and interested people. The global village itself was brilliant. As it was such a great experience, R&D are hoping to do something even bigger and better for 2016.

Mia's round-up:

I really enjoyed every part of the Mozilla Festival experience, from preparing and running the workshop with Lianne, to attending other workshops and meeting some really interesting people at the festival. A particularly interesting workshop was led by a couple of experts in virtual reality and 360-degree video, who wanted us to think about ideas for how virtual reality and 360-degree cameras can be used for storytelling. This session involved working in groups to create storyboards and then feeding these back to the rest of the group. This was a really helpful activity to think about how the BBC may use VR in storytelling and journalism.