Cookie Jar is an experiment in reverse engineering the process by which marketing companies piece together our identities based on our browser history. This project was inspired by my own browser history, which, due to the odd nature of much of my work, often has me searching for products that, for example, only plumbers generally buy or, alternatively, researching esoteric computer vision topics. Collectively, what kind of identity does this add up to?
For a few weeks, I had three people collect the cookie ads they saw online. A collage of these ads then got made for each person. Five Mechanical Turk workers for each ad profile were asked to write a biography for the person whom these ads were targeting. Not surprisingly, the accuracy of each biography was staggeringly low. More importantly, though, my intention was to decode the process by which our identities get composed via our internet activities in a way that feels human, personal and intimate. What does the digital advertising engine have to lose if they get us wrong? And what do we have to lose, or maybe even gain?
This project was developed for Jer Thorp's Spring, 2014 Data Art class and can also be viewed on Jer's blog.
Jer used this concept to promote his browser plugin Floodwatch, which automatically aggregates the ads you view online. The Cookie Jar concept was featured in Gizmodo, Fast Company, Al Jazeera America and his original post on Medium.
