New BigFoot Initiative Aims to Identify How Much We Value Privacy on Social Media

21 January 2021
New BigFoot Initiative Aims to Identify How Much We Value Privacy on Social Media

Posted: 26/01/16

Would you like to find out more about your online privacy needs and how your personal data is used? Increasingly we spend more and more of our lives online however most of us don’t fully understand what happens with our data and how it is used for good or bad. A new initiative called BigFoot was launched on Thursday 28th January to mark Data Protection Day 2016.  The BigFoot Initiative aims to involve the wider community in topics around privacy through a dedicated website. It allows any individual or organisation to participate in a wider global debate about how personal data is used and how it should be used.

Members of the BigFoot Initiative have already developed a social media analytics app.  The joint endeavour was undertaken by researchers at the ADAPT Centre for Digital Content Technology at Trinity, the Dublin based Artificial Intelligence start-up AYLIEN, and Science Gallery Dublin. The developed app gives users and researchers an insight into how personal social media data is used and how others perceive it. The BigFoot app can retrieve a person’s activity, including likes, comments and preferences, across multiple social media platforms, before collating it and presenting the user with their digital footprint or BigFoot profile.

The overall mission of the BigFoot Initiative is to engage and empower the user, organisations and policy makers in shaping the future of online private data. The debate and the developed app seeks to make the user more ‘privacy aware’ and offer advice on how to adjust the privacy settings of online apps towards personal privacy needs.

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