EUR-LEX AI Search
PROJECT
Case study
SERVICES
User Experience Design
A speculative digital service that helps to provide transparency and awareness to your online data privacy.
ABOUT THE PROJECT
DTOUR is a speculative digital service designed to empower users with greater control over their online privacy. It simplifies privacy management by providing tools to reduce digital footprints, prevent data collection, and offer a clear overview of privacy policies. Through features like a privacy policy filter, a secure password manager, and the ability to generate randomized online identities, DTOUR helps users break connections to their real identities and protect personal information. The project highlights the hidden mechanisms of data tracking and profiling, enabling users to understand who collects their data and how it is used.
The Goal
Reduce digital footprint
Prevent data collection
Simplify privacy policy agreements overview
Who has your data?
Some websites permit data broker companies, advertising companies and businesses to track your browsing activity across platforms and devices. The data is analysed in real-time, and as a result, affect persons available choices directly. DTOUR can help you to discover what occurs in the background of the digital tracking and profiling ecosystem. View what data was collected in the report.
What do social media know about you?
Social media are one of the most prominent data collectors. They can capture a complete profile about you and the people you know. Find out how much data is collected over time from every platform and discover what information is linked to you. DTOUR will help you create a new ID unrelated to you that will break the links associated with your identity.
What is your online identyty?
According to research, data is collected from multiple sources without the individual's awareness. Each person is assigned a ID based on the information collected through tracking and cross-site tracking. Protect your online privacy by generating a new ID that will help break the links to you further. DTOUR will randomly select data to disguise your true identity. The online browsing identity incorporates other options to protect privacy, such as blocking advertisers, clear browsing history, set your cookies preferences, change your IP address and data encryption settings. The user can explore the websites that use cross-site tracking.
Process
Comparative Analysis
User Research
Secondary Research
Wireframing & Prototyping
Research findings
Every click made or swipe on a smart device may trigger a myriad of hidden data-sharing mechanisms. With the data being analyzed in real-time, this directly affects available choices.
Most of us have some intuitive sense of what “privacy” means in the physical world, but when it comes to how our digital lives provide insights into what we think, believe, or know, our intuition often falters.
According to research, data is collected from multiple sources without the individual's awareness. Each person is assigned a ID based on the information collected through tracking and cross-site tracking.
Social media are one of the most prominent data collectors. They can capture a complete profile about you and the people you know.
Research Mind Map
Online privacy is a huge topic to grasp, and there are many hidden privacy issues. The research mind-map was created to narrow down the problem area. It represents the key aspects of personal online privacy and helps to point out essential topics that should be addressed.
Comparative Analysis
In summary, the analysed services have a common theme of protecting the user's privacy online. However, the approach differs from one another. Making users aware of the risk of sharing information on social media is included in all the services analysed except one. Data breach awareness is another common theme. It can be concluded that no service would tackle all privacy concerns and rather concentrates on a few particular privacy concerns.
Information Architecture
The basic information architecture points out two essential aspects of the privacy settings. The first section explains what happens behind the scenes without any effort required from the user. The second part concentrates on the actions that the user can take.
Basic Navigation Wireframe
The basic wireframe represents how the user would navigate from the browser experience through the vignette to each section of the privacy service.
User Flow
The user flow below demonstrates what actions can be taken from the user and how the user would navigate through the dashboard.
Basic Screen Flow
An example of the features accessed from the dashboard and vignettes. The user can discover the main elements of their online privacy in the dashboards and act in accordance with the information found in the reports.
Conclusion
It is practically impossible to live in modern society without leaving a digital trace. The fundamental question is, how much privacy are we willing to sacrifice in order to achieve cost savings and convenience? The advertising campaigns have been here before and were successful without all the data that is collected now. We need to find a way to make the invisible visible when it comes to our online identity. The ultimate goal should be to protect us from further polarisation and give us the option to view content as objectively as possible.
Being informed on protecting our online identity is a step forward, and the need for accountability and transparency is more critical than ever. Dtour could provide a starting point of realising the need for privacy to individuals. It aspires to help individuals in managing their online privacy with manageable steps.
Future improvements
The product would benefit from further in-depth user testing and expert interviews. Feedback from focus groups would determine some of its features' usability and possible nullification of unnecessary features. The overall solution to privacy could include additional software hardware to protect the users in the background and require no additional effort.