And "here's the most amusing way to learn the depressing news about your vanishing privacy," Forbes magazine commented on a new Austrian-designed online game titled "Data Dealer", set for launch this week. It hopes to make people a little more aware of privacy risks. "(Companies) are collecting more and more personal data," designer Wolfie Christl told AFP. "At the same time, people are bored with thinking about this... so we had the idea to make a game out of it." "Data Dealer," a browser game in the same style as Facebook's popular "FarmVille," won the Games for Change "most significant impact" award in New York in June. Some 80,000 players have already tested the game, which received funding from the Austrian government and the City of Vienna and will be available online for free. "I don't think most people can really imagine what it means not only to collect but also to collate and to combine all these massive amounts of personal data," said Christl, one of the game's four core designers. Even "really boring" information can be a goldmine, he added. That idea of "Data Dealer" is about players collecting thousands of profiles at the click of a mouse, using shady characters, which are pretty colorful and amusing. But the scary bit is the message behind the game, AFP says, which is everything you put online can be used against you. For a few hundred dollars, a manager of a tanning salon will hand over his client list, including names, birthdates and email addresses. Loyalty cards reveal buying habits. A dating site profile turns up a person's relationship status and even the age when they had their first sexual encounter. The player can then sell this information to a major employer, a rental authority or a security agency to make a quick buck and expand his or her virtual empire, AFP reports. "Data Dealer" is just a game, but it’s easily applicable to reality. "People don't know about the value of this personal data and they also don't control it," Christl said, adding: "If we want to have a positive future digital society then we really need to enable people to make the self-determined use of personal data and get back control of it." Vienna's creative agency Departure praised "Data Dealer" as "the most innovative international approach to... data protection and online media competence". "A game will probably not make a big difference, but it is a building block," Tassilo Pellegrini, communications expert at St. Poelten technical college, told AFP. "Data Dealer can boost people's awareness, and with more awareness they might then act differently." The team is now planning an educational version of the game and is working with schools and digital literacy programs. As Christl put it: "It should also be entertaining; it's not about preaching." Olga Yazhgunovich, Source: Voice Of Russia
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