Goose Egg

When participating in online social networking one is almost always confronted with agreement statements or terms of use regarding privacy policies. When one agrees to an online terms of use statement and submits his or her personal information are they fully aware of what their information is being use for? How many people read the terms of use statement in detail, or at all? Once becoming part of a social network who has access to ones personal information?

GooseEgg is a project that makes visible the things that online social networking structures make invisible. By setting up a station on Dundas Street and collecting information from pedestrians, we are investigating the number of people willing to submit their information without knowing the outcome. What is displayed in the visualization is the live data collected from pedestrians and configured by members of the GooseEgg team. When registering for the social network each pedestrian provides only their name and email address; the GooseEgg team conducts various searches online to create each profile on the spot.

Once each profile is activated by the GooseEgg team it will be accessible by the user who input his or her information.  The end result of this art piece is a collection of data uncovered from elsewhere on the web. This data reveals the public presence that each of us has on the web through our use of social networking.

The Result

Over the course of four hours the GooseEgg team, stationed inside the Ted Rogers School of Management on Dundas Street, was able to recruit many new users bringing the user count up to 70 people. The majority of the people willing to sign up were Ryerson students due to the fact that they felt comfortable signing up for a social network created by fellow Ryerson students. Those who were not Ryerson students signed up during the short amounts of time when the laptops were brought out onto the street, or while passing through the building while trying to access the Eatons Center. Those who refused to sign-up for the social network were generally over the age of 50, unfamiliar with the technology or simply uninterested.

The GooseEgg team worked in a very coordinated manner when profiling each user. There was one team member stationed on Dundas Street strictly devoted to finding users pictures online once they signed-up. This made it certain that the information posted about them was true and not belonging to another person with the same name. Team members stationed at each gallery space on the Ryerson and OCAD campus completed the rest of the profiling.

During the time when the users were entering their information on the GooseEgg registry page, they were not at all concerned with where their information was going or what the purpose of the project was. Although there was a defense speech planned for those who adamantly inquired, there was no need to use it. It was not until after the information was posted onto the profiles that there was questioning. Please see the video documentation to further understand the mechanics of the piece.