Summary

Digital emissions are traces of seemingly innocuous data that reflect everyday activities (e.g., liking a Tweet). However, they are also essential for the modern economy (e.g., financial transactions). Like greenhouse gasses, digital emissions are invisible and appear harmless, but can make individuals, groups, and society vulnerable. As more systems become interconnected and new devices enter the digital ecosystem, the problem of digital emissions and how to manage pollution will become of paramount importance in the next 5-10 years. For citizens to become proactive rather than reactionary in protecting their data, we need to first understand how people understand digital emissions and associated vulnerabilities.

Building on innovative developments within speculative design, we will explore how probe-based methods can elicit reactions and reflections about current and near-future vulnerabilities from digital emissions. Specifically, some participants will talk aloud as they use their smartphone while others will discuss how new technology that might evolve from science fiction could impact them in the future. The results of this project will act as a first step towards a larger body of research that develops future-oriented technical solutions and policy recommendations to reduce the risks of digital emissions, increase trust, and enhance individual and collective privacy.

Outputs

Project Interview: Footprints to emissions: Exploring near-future digital vulnerabilities with creative methodologies

Impact

Data analysis is ongoing, but our main findings to date suggest:

(1)    College educated young people are aware of a broad range of risks associated with using digital technologies, from privacy risks in omnipresent tracking cookies to security risks such as hacking and identify theft. This finding is in line with the extant literature.

(2)    Some participants in the study went to great lengths to manage their digital footprint: they regularly clean up their Internet history, use VPN, and even create “burner” accounts to avoid tracking and spamming.

(3)    Nevertheless, there are two contrasting reactions toward the hypothetical scenario of stolen personal data: one group would ‘feel exposed’, while the other shrugs off any potential consequences by saying ‘there’s nothing really private’.

(4)    The latter group is particularly interesting.  The notion of the privacy paradox builds upon the observation that people care about their privacy but act as if they don’t; however, our finding seems to suggest there is no such ‘paradox’ or discrepancy between attitude and behaviour among some young people. This aligns with other recent quantitative work that has provided further evidence against the privacy paradox.

(5)    Related to the point above, overall, our participants seem to care much more about their smartphone device than their digital footprint.  They would ‘panic’ if someone stole their phone because the phone is such an important artefact integral to their daily life, losing it means ‘massive inconvenience’; by contrast, stolen data is ‘not a disaster’ because the data are either recoverable from cloud backup or not viewed as especially sensitive.

(6)    Lastly, our study reveals the ambivalence towards information security risks among young people. Some participants were struggling to make sense of digital risks (what do they mean in more concrete terms?), which highlights the need to enhance infosec education among young people.  This participant’s quote is illustrative: “I guess we are not really made aware of the dangers of like data misuse, so I wouldn’t know what to think first if like they said oh your data has been stolen, I would think well what does that mean?”

The team are currently writing up these results as part of a formal publication while also remaining proactive in the dissemination of this and related work to interested parties as part of related research projects and centres. This includes blogs, keynote talks and conference events (see above). We anticipate a spike in activities following the publication of our key findings.   

Future work

This work has supported and strengthened a Research Beacon at the University of Bath that focuses on the cultural, economic and psychological value of new and emerging forms of data. This may, soon, develop into a research centre.

In addition, results have fed into related proposals that align with the ESRC’s Digital Footprints programme. One grant is currently under review. There will be additional opportunities for other researchers to get involved if this work is funded or via Phase II of the Digital Footprints Programme (assuming this is commissioned by UKRI).