I'm taking a DATA leak (2024)

And I’m casually making private data tangible. Data is my paint and for this piece I took some local paint: the data leaked by meta for the 9000 postal codes (9030,9040, .. included). I ended up with the records of 79564 facebook dwellers from Ghent or closeby. I filtered this data keeping only their first names (not the bios, emails, phonenumbers, birth dates, ...) put these in a long sequence. The list of names is 541520 characters long. I calculated how big the characters should be to fit them on a 730x570cm billboard and ended up with characters 0.76cm tall. That is very legible when seen from up close. From afar, only the meta message (pun intended) will be visible.

I try to make data tangible. The data printed on the billboard is a tiny fraction of the data companies like Meta keep on every (un)willing individual. Yet I need an enormous billboard to show it. These companies process a multiple of this data every instant for “our own interests”. As this data is easily obtained (I unzipped the 533 Million records about 15 minutes after I started looking for them) it can be considered public data (although the legal definition would call it private in most countries). There is evidence this is used by (not so) rogue governments and political actors worldwide to influence democratic processes. I’m using data to advertise this on a billboard.

I cannot host the final image, it is too big to be siplayed on your browser (probably) but here's an excerpt

I submitted this project for the 019 open billboard call, but did not make it into the selection. So this work still looks for a home. Feel free to contact me if you want to put this up somewhere, I have data for all countries/cities where facebook is available