PRIVASEE | Devpost

Inspiration

A common theme occuring on big-data collection websites like facebook, google, and instagram is dark patterns. A dark pattern is an arrangement of information on a website in which it makes it difficult for a user to access a certain function. Often these functionalities that are difficult to access are related to stopping the use of the service, downloading your data that has been collected by the service, and privacy settings.

Privasee is a program that can allow users that don't necessarily have a strong background in tech to quickly see what information is available at certain URLs and subsequent menu pages of URLs. Privasee displays that this information is available if you go looking for it, but will not display the sensitive information.

This approach gives a simple fix to see if a user has forgotten to flick a few switches on some sub-menu so that they don't have to waste time searching through menus which were designed to be difficult and time-consuming.

Additionally, we wanted to make an easy way for users to get involved in their own privacy. Instead of walking them step by step through each and every available program, we made a short article about how they can protect their own data and metadata with something as simple as a browser extension.

What it does

Using advanced searching, PRIVASEE searches through the markup of a given social media URL. If it finds any mention of sensitive information such as age, address, school, work, email, phone number etc, then it lets the user know how many times each sensitive information was found. For privacy purposes, it does not say what the information is.

How we built it

We created the website using HTML and CSS and added more dynamic features using JavaScript. The searching algorithm is coded in C++.

Challenges we ran into

We found it difficult to link all the components of PRIVASEE together. These components being the base website, The JavaScript code, and the C++ algorithm. In addition, we had trouble setting up the cloud host as it was our first time working with creating a domain name and the host service.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of creating a functioning and aesthetically pleasing website for the first time and incorporating JavaScript and C++ into it.

What we learned

We learnt that we should not be scared to try out new software and experiences but make good use of the resources around us to solve the problems we encounter.

What's next for PRIVASEE

We hope to be able to improve in PRIVASEE to the point that it is capable of scouring the web for any mention of you name and pulling up your social media accounts from one search instead of several.