Anti-Surveillance Project

Surveillance Project

Goals of this Project

Many people rely on the internet to share things of their creation to make money. People like artist, models, and sex worker often have their content stolen and resold or given away without their permission. In order to combat this, they must uses services that can protect their information. These services often have costs associated to them. This cost could be monetary but it could also be visiblity. In order to gain attention and make money, these individuals need to have more visiblity. So I wanted to come up with a solution that could serve protecting data and keeping the user visbile and maybe even increase the visiblity.

The first design idea was to create program that could track the data of any person looking at a image or video and embed it within the file itself as invisble text. For example, I share a video on twitter with someone else, and the person viewing the video would have their information tracked and logged. The program would take the date, time, and username of the person watching the video, and the videos original creator. This way, if the video is downloaded and reuploaded someone else on the internet there would be a history of the the creator and the person who reuploaded the video. This give the creator more power to prevent this same person from taking their videos. However, this project was way beyond the scope of t I could do in a limited time. Also it has several privacy issues that I would need to address.

The second design idea was a program that could hide "invisible" text within a picture or video. This text could be a password, a username, a website url, or and information useful to the user. This allows the creator to share their work on public profiles with this hidden code. I image some people could use this to simply place a watermark to show ownership. Others can setup a protected file or folder that requires a passcode to access. This password could change daily/weekly, or be assigned to individuals. I felt this prject would actually be achieveable in a limited time.

Design Process

I wanted to implement both the rotate() and for() loop functions we learning about in lecture. In a very short time I found visually interesting designs. I settled on a design with squares and ellipses rotating around the canvas. I wanted to make the process of finding the code more interactive. So their is a hint to how to find the code on the page. This hint will constantly be moving so the user would have to follow it. I thought of it as a more complex recaptcha. The hint would tell the user the "color of the day". With this knowledge the user could narrow down where the code is. For example, if the color is blue, then the code would be found next to blue rectangles.

Reflection

I had a clear idea in my head about what I wanted to do with this project. However, the scope was just too big for me to accomplish in one week. I settled for a more limited scope. Ultimately I think the results were decent. I really wanted this project to be modular to easily fit the needs of any user. The users can add more complexcity and variation to make it more sercure. However, as it the program is not fully self suffiient. It would require a second program to validate the code and give access to the protected data. I would have liked to be able to built this into this program but it was too big of a goal for now.n