Privacy Quest is a game using arcade machines to gather information on how people expect their smart home data to be used. It especially looked at the public’s perception of how sensitive data is and compared it to GDPR special vs not special data categories.  General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a European law that protects the privacy and security of personal data. GDPR special data categories are seen as more sensitive and include data such as race, sexuality, or genetic data, whereas non special includes name, email address or phone number. By inviting passersby in public spaces to play a short arcade-style game, the project rapidly gathered diverse perspectives on what types of data are considered more or less sensitive and how these views align or conflict with existing GDPR classifications. This game-based approach not only offers an engaging method for collecting large-scale public input but also provides real-time, educational feedback to participants — showing their level of agreement with GDPR’s data-protection principles and views how sensitive types of data are. The purpose of this was to show the intersectionality of users privacy preferences for smart home devices data collection and highlight potential policy gaps, making a case for more inclusive, user-centric data regulations. 

This research was part of the Festival for Social Science at Newcastle University.