The Attention Fair

You are no Facebook or Google user, nor an Amazon or Uber customer, and not a streamer of Netflix. You are their product. Janssen wants to give the impulse to people to think about the question: How do you, as an individual, gain self-control over your digital identity and the monetary value it represents in the Internet economy?

An installation consisting of twelve games, experiments and visualizations on data ownership and the monetary value of personal information.

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Discover the value of your own risk and advertising profile. In this installation, Janssen provides insight into the complexity of the Internet economy. In twelve games, experiments, and visualizations, you can dig into the research that she has been working on for about a year and a half. She partnered up with experts in the data economy, online advertising, profiling, and privacy regulations. To make the value of personal information more tangible, Janssen created a currency called the ‘data stocks’, a system based on the methodologies of the stock market. This system is the core of all elements in the installation. To make this system, Janssen combined various studies to map out the values of human characteristics and combinations thereof – called ‘profiling’. For example, someone pregnant is more valuable to Facebook than a happily single peer – Expecting a child means an excellent opportunity for advertisers to seduce you with expensive products.

The installation invites the audience to do their own research: to play games with the characteristics of others or to discover their personal price tag. The message of this installation is: you are no Facebook or Google user, nor an Amazon or Uber customer, and not a streamer of Netflix. You are their product. Janssen wants to give the impulse to people to think about the question: How do you, as an individual, gain self-control over your digital identity and the monetary value it represents in the Internet economy?