by Janicke Roell
Hi, my name is Janicke and I am a Creative Business graduate student at the University of Applied Sciences in Utrecht. For the last couple of months, I have been busy creating an educational tool to improve data literacy amongst generation Z. To be as specific as possible, I want to focus on passive data collection done by Dutch e-commerce sites. As passive data collection is the phenomenon where online users do not give permission to the e-commerce sites to collect some sort of data.
By doing qualitative and quantitative research, the problem arose that due to the lack of knowledge about passive data collection, online consumers and customers of generation Z feel there is a power asymmetry between e-commerce sites and online users. Causing online consumers and customers to give away data without understanding what data they give away, which results in online users mistrusting companies and having concerns about their privacy and security.
To solve these issues, I focused on finding a solution to increase the power of the online consumer by demanding transparency of the Dutch e-commerce sites. I made a website called PDexpert where online users of generation Z can watch interactive videos about passive data collection. The content of the interactive videos entails the definition of passive data collection, the collection of personal data, the legal side, and what you, as an online consumer, can do to ask for transparency of your passive data collected by Dutch e-commerce sites.
Traffic is generated towards the website through the Instagram page PDexpert.nl. The page will contain news of companies misbehaving and tips on what online consumers can do to ask for data collection transparency (with the direct link towards the PDexpert website).
By participating in PDexpert interactive videos, online users of generation Z will become data literate and will request transparency of Dutch e-commerce sites.
