Hi Lemmy,

intro I study fine art and for a project I want to buy some of the data from brokers from all of the art students at my university.

The point is to show people how easy it is to get that data.

questions: I have a list of emails and names. Can I go to data brokers and buy all of the data associated with those emails ot does it not work like that?* Can I then combine various datasets and build a better and better collection? How and where do I actually buy that data?

about the project at our annual university festival, I would have old desks with old PCs (like in a government building, or at the DMV) people can come and I will tell them something about them or even print them their data on an old looking printer.

Thank you

1 point

Dark web

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1 point

Lol where?

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3 points

i don’t have any info for you but please do this, this is the kind of thing we NEED, on an even larger scale. If you succeed, you should make a post about it.

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3 points

I think I get what you are trying to do and many people have pointed out the ethical issues. Its like you don’t want to do art to show the plight of orphans by making people orphans in the exhibit. The first thing that came to mind is if you look into things like salting and hashing. Both to protect data but also to bring up issues around that (future tech invalidating them) or maybe make your art more about the issues with collecting data and anonymizing it like what big tech companies do. Combining that last part with information gained would still be an ethical line but it is something being done right now in society that people accept.

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0 points

bro who cares about ethics

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3 points

Aren’t there like… ethics issues with this?

You helpfully did not identify the country, but if it’s the United States, you can just ask the state to send you the entire list of registered voters. Some states will charge a large amount of money, some won’t. You could probably do something fun with that.

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1 point

Yes - which is exactly the point of the project.

I wanna make people aware that this is all of the data they “voluntarily” give up when using services.

I’m in the EU

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8 points

The point is to show people how easy it is to get that thata

asks how to get the data

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3 points

Haha good point

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