Incautious Porn

We searched for Porn.
We found you.

We captured more than 100,000 public comments on porn and sexually oriented websites in which users left their mobile phone number to male/female/transgender performers, where everyone could see it, and we turned them into a series of paintings which you can purchase.

Incautious Porn

Incautious Porn

Incautious Porn

We access social networking websites every day.

We think they’re free, but what we really are doing is accessing services which we pay by granting access to our personal datato companies, organizations, institutions, aggregators, marketing firms etcetera.

And there’s more.

While we navigate these websites we tend to radically transform our perception of what is public and what is private.

We often engage messaging, chats, comments and content production without realizing that we’re saying and posting things in public, where anyone can see them, and use them.

Incautious Porn

Incautious Porn

Incautious Porn is about this.

It is about the transformation of the ways in which we perceive private and public spaces.

It is about being sold hundreds of times each day: our data, information, emotions, relations.

Incautious Porn, an anthropological experiment in blackmail and the perception of private/public space online

We have radically changed our perception of what is public and what is private.

While using social networks, search engines and websites determining who has access to our information, our personal details, our habits and preferences is often complex or not easily accessible.

incautious

incautious

Each person‘s information is sold hundreds of times each day, while surfing websites and social media sites, with information passing from one provider to the other in ways that are subtle and non-transparent: data collected on one site may be used on other sited to sell us advertisements or to investigate on our lives.

On top of that, most people tend to interpret social media sites as new forms of public spaces, and it is fundamental for service providers‘ strategies that this perception is maintained, to promote our full disclosure, allowing them to collect even more data about ourselves.

We used the project Incautious Porn to investigate on this scenario, to explore the shifting and blurring of the boundaries of what we perceive as our privacy and as our private and public spaces.

Incautious Porn uses the operations of a fake company systematically invading our privacy (even to the point of performing simulated forms of blackmail) to collect enormous amounts of information which we have used to analyze this scenario.

In Incautious Porn art acts both as a sensor on the transformation of human societies and as a tool for analyzing its effects.

The effects of the Incautious Porn project and communication campaign have been massive, bringing it to the attention of a large, global, audience and, thus, allowing the research team to benefit from a large data set.

Furthermore, the actions of the blackmailing fake-company have been led using an ethical approach: no money was taken from people, and all their personal data has been preserved, also using the initiative as a testing lab for novel privacy and security preservation techniques, and as a campaign for awareness about the transformation of people‘s perception of contemporary private/public spaces.

Incautious Porn on AOS

Incautious Porn at SSN2014 in Barcelona
The Mirror and The Source @ Penny W. Stamps Speaker Series
Incautious Porn: a voyage into privacy