Project #5: Anti-Surveillance Tool

Description

In this project, I created a conceptual anti-surveillance tool to bypass the technological surveillance we experience nowadays. I further experimented the use of for-loop and nested loop in this project by creating rectangles as a glitching effect. My program can be triggered by dragging the mouse across the image(where the real image will reveal but accompanied by warning texts) and clicking the mouse(the real image will reveal without the warning texts).

Technical components that I explored in this project:

- For-loop

- Nested Loop

Design Process

The inspiration of this project came from a true story that happened to my roommate around a year ago. She was notified by her friend that someone was stalking her online and stealing her pictures from her social media. The stalker even created a profile page with her images and was online-dating boys for money. Nowadays, the prevalence of social media has made individuals easy targets from surveillance. There are also vast amounts of real-life examples where private photos of celebrities are leaked without permission. Our photo privacy can be so easily violated by not only the government and program algorithms, but also other netizens. Therefore, I want to create an image smudging tool that can protect the images that people upload online from being downloaded without permission.

Through this project, I want to communicate to:

- People who want to keep their images private to themselves.

- People who want to share their images to a certain group of people.

I used the image of my cat Mochi for this project because I think her expression seems like she is warning somebody(which I think is extremely cute) and I didn’t want to use the image of a human. On the other hand, who knows if pets actually demand for image privacy? If they do, Mochi can be a pioneer of that area, fighting for the rights for pets.