February 2014

In late 2005, Google started to provide free access to a web analytics product based on the previously expensive Urchin software suite. In the seven years since, this strategy succeeded to get Google Analytics tracking code included in a stunning share of websites by providing access to a powerful tool at (seemingly) no cost for everyone from big corporations to hobbyist bloggers. "Oh, and we'll of course add Google Analytics to the site" is a common phrase in the context of a web project, by large agencies and teenage family webmasters alike: Google has managed to define their product as an implicit standard for visitor analysis on the web. Adding the tracking code is easy and the data the service provides is of unquestionable quality. Yet, privacy advocates have long pointed out the serious implications of one corporation being able to track users around such a massive slice of the internet [...]

While browsing around the internet, data is not only transferred from web servers to our screens, but also in the other direction: mostly invisible to the user, code embedded in websites sends usage data back to the provider of the website and to third-party services. Working with websites, their design and technical infrastructure on a daily basis, I have always been aware of this. Regardless, the scale of this practice makes me shudder every time I activate the Mozilla Lightbeam plugin (formerly known as Collusion) that visualizes all the tracking providers outside of visited web services [...]

On January 28, Data Privacy Day encouraged everyone to make protecting privacy and data a greater priority; a good trigger to start a long-planned series on some things I have been working on over the last year. With "Privacy-Aware Design", I aim to create a discussion around privacy as encountered by interaction designers on the UI/UX level. I consider it important to acknowledge that the protection of users' information is not just rooted in the service concept (data collection, sharing, visibility) or purely an engineering challenge in the background (encryption, access control, data storage in general), but that privacy is also deeply affected by design decisions on the user-facing interfaces of internet services. [...]