by Charles Foucault-Dumas published on 17 August 2021

Data collectives News

A new project joins the HestiaLabs fold! After Dating Privacy and its tools for dating app users to understand how their data is used, The Eyeballs reveals the hidden side of the digital world: those invisible trackers that observe, record and analyse everything you do online.

What's the point? Have you ever thought that your phone is spying on your conversations? Advertising sometimes seems to react to what you come up with. The reality is more complex: by studying your online behaviour and that of your friends and family (clicks, shares, likes, mouse movements, etc.), platforms end up knowing you better than you do. It is these mechanisms that The Eyeballs will reveal: what traces have you left online? How are they used to target you? And by whom? This will put you on an equal footing with those who try to influence you without your knowledge.

Understanding is fighting back

As I keep saying it, you must be starting to know it: HestiaLabs is made up of a bunch of visionary and convinced geeks who put (free of charge, thanks to the support of the Migros Pioneer Fund) their hyper-specialized skills in data science at the service of virtuous projects. For The Eyeballs, this merry company (I'll soon introduce them to you one by one) is developing tools that will allow you to retrieve the data accumulated on you by the digital services you use, but above all to understand the indecipherable files you'll be retrieving.

And then there's me. My job is to watch them do it (with glowing eyes) and tell you all about it. That's how I became a beta tester for The Eyeballs and how we started to work on the data accumulated on me by Twitter...

To discover our first adventures, it's here :

I am a woman, I speak German and I like milk, so says Twitter

Charles Foucault-Dumas