What the Internet Knows

For while now I’ve been intrigued by the amount of personal data that the internet slowly gathers about us. And by personal data I don’t mean bank details, phone numbers, search habits, or shopping preferences. Rather, I’m interested in the innocuous minor details that the internet slowly logs about us, as we go about our day-to-day lives whilst being connected to the internet through various services. Nothing much that PRISM would be interested in.

I was playing around with various ways to present this kind of data, and forming some kind of parsing to make it slightly more meaningful or at least easier to read. What I came up with can be seen here.

A detail from the What the Internet Knows interface showing parsed public personal data.

This is something I’m constantly tweaking, and trying to improve both the services used to gather the data, as well as the parsing done to the gathered data. Currently on it’s second major version, it now displays context specific illustrations courtesy of Lindsay J. Haynes.

One of Lindsay J. Haynes's context-specific illustrations created for What the Internet Knows. — Context-specific illustrations by Lindsay J. Haynes.

Project details

Client: Personal project
Illustration: Lindsay J. Haynes