Think Privacy
Think Privacy is a nationwide public service announcement campaign and a mirror installation by artist and researcher Adam Harvey. Inhabiting public space on the same terms as advertisement, it challenges us to reflect on one of the most pressing ethical and political questions of our time: what does it mean to live in a world where data on our movements, faces, and habits are continuously recorded and processed?
Originally created in 2016, Think Privacy has only grown more relevant. It urges today’s audiences to examine the data trails left by the most ordinary gestures of daily life: taking selfies, unlocking phones and making payments with our faces, going through automated passport control, using a smart doorbell. Yet the implications of this shift remain largely invisible to the people it concerns most. Who holds that data, how exactly is it used, and to whose benefit?
The mirror, installed to face the main high street in Esch-sur-Alzette, invites passersby to look at themselves and perhaps take a selfie, while the bold orange text on its surface confronts them with an uncomfortable truth: taking and sharing a selfie is always a data transaction. The new posters, presented across the country and created specifically for Luxembourg’s five linguistic communities, address questions of larger data transaction, use, and surveillance, with designs specific to Luxembourg’s multilingual and cultural context.
The exhibition is accompanied by an exclusive essay, which extends the original inquiry into a dimension that is even less visible: the passive data collection triggered simply by the presence of a smartphone in a connected environment, where devices continuously broadcast signals that reveal the history of our movements and habits to any system equipped to listen and to observe.
As artificial intelligence reshapes the conditions under which personal data is gathered and exploited, informed public debate on the topic is no longer desirable but necessary. Think Privacy does not offer easy answers. It asks the questions that too rarely get asked and discussed in public, in the places where the public actually is.
Artist
Adam Harvey
Elektron Project Space
74 rue de l’Alzette, L‑4010, Esch-sur-Alzette, Luxembourg
Curators
Vincent Crapon, Françoise Poos
Biography
Adam Harvey (US/DE) is a Berlin-based artist and researcher working on computer vision, privacy, and surveillance. He is Chief Technologist at Tech 4 Tracing, an NGO applying technology to humanitarian weapons detection, and founder of VFRAME, a computer vision project for human rights researchers, which received an Award of Distinction from Ars Electronica in 2019. His groundbreaking research on computer vision camouflage (CV Dazzle, 2010), anti-surveillance fashion (Stealth Wear, 2012), and face recognition datasets has been featured on the front pages of newspapers from the New York Times to the Air Force Times and exhibited widely at festivals and internationally acclaimed institutions.