Fresh Personal Information (2018)

I have created a shop “Fresh Personal Information” in a real space, a shop where the buying and selling of personal data, which normally takes place between companies in a place where the user is not aware of it, digitally, takes place. In this shop, cards are sold, labelled as personal information cards. The card says: “Personal data of 10,000 women in their 20s who bought cold medicine at a convenience store yesterday: 500,000 yen”, “Personal data of 100 men in their 40s who bought hay fever masks on Amazon today: 100,000 yen” and so on. These may not be things that anyone would want just by looking at them, but if you were work at pharmaceutical company, you might want them.
This is because if you have personal data about a person who buys cold medicine at a convenience store, there is a good chance that person has a cold, and you can pinpoint that person and send them an ad for that company’s cold medicine, and if they buy the medicine, you will make a sale. In this way, it shows that personal data that users think is of no value can be sold at a high price by some companies.
With this exhibition, we hope that users will discover that information that is of no particular value to them is actually of economic value to some companies, and that many different types of personal data about themselves are actually being collected.