PANAPTICON FOUNDATION: Experimental campaign

case studies

published

Do you monitor your blood pressure via a smartwatch? And did you know that you consent to this information being used by corporations, for example when deciding whether to grant a loan or sell insurance? We created a campaign especially for the Panoptykon Foundation to show how much intimate information our heart rate reveals.

Client

Panaopticon Fundation

Idea and design

TWIN .digital collective

Application

Panowie Programiści

The centrepiece of the campaign was an experiment in which male and female participants monitored their partner's pulse using a smartwatch app. The couples invited to the experiment - people in stable relationships but living apart - were given access to data from their partner's or partner's app. When the pulse rate of the person wearing the smartwatch exceeded the average (around 90 beats per minute), the monitor received a notification on partner's phone. Thay could interpret faster pulse by selecting one of the options from a predefined list: excitement, stress, sexual or sporting activity, psychostimulants consumed. They responded about their impressions in the video.

We implemented the campaign together with TWIN .digital collective. For it, we created an app that, using smartwatches, monitored participants' heart rates and sent alerts to their partners.

The Panaptykon Foundation, through a campaign, warns that every time you accept a privacy policy, you are giving access to your most intimate information not only to app developers but also to their commercial partners. Your personal data, including sensitive data, can be passed on to so-called brokers who collect personal information about web users. From there, it goes to advertisers, who target messages with it. This is valuable knowledge. For example, information about whether a woman is pregnant increases the market value of her data several times over. More and more people are becoming aware of this problem and do not accept this invasion of privacy.