PROFILING THE PROFILERS (Sousveillance of Big Tech Companies Using Their Own Tools)

Today’s Internet platforms are overly financed by advertisements. With 80% of global personal data which they offer to advertisers and third parties under unregulated policies, the major Big Tech players (ie. Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Microsoft) became pivotal in the shift to the era of digital post-truth and the influence industry: micro-profiling, disinformation campaigns, bots, illegal data harvesting, troll farms, persuasive design.

As a response to this information asymmetry, DISNOVATION.ORG seizes the means of data analytics to create a series of psychological, cultural and political profiles of the most data-extractivist Big Tech companies of our time: GAFAM, NATU, BATX… To do so, their custom made algorithm exploits big data analysis techniques in order to extract hidden correlations from publicly available big datasets (ie. Wikipedia).

These automated actions will result in a series of highly detailed, and biased, digital profiles of Big Tech, similar to the ones constantly generated for each user by these very same companies. This counter-profiling data will be continuously released on a dedicated platform as notifications, optimized for social media sharing by each visitor. This will result in a distributed counter-propaganda campaign, eventually polluting the social feeds of Big Tech companies.

Read an interview with the artists here.

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