The phrase ‘data exhaust’ refers to the phenomenon of collecting so-called ‘behavioral surplus’ by private companies such as Google or Facebook. The collection of personal data on users has enabled the creation of targeted advertising and content profiling, which are among the main tools and sources of income in surveillance capitalism. Initially, this data was treated as raw material collected to improve search engine functions and services. After some time, however, the main purpose of behavioral surplus became to guarantee the profitability of ads by profiling them as accurately as possible to specific individuals. The phrase “data exhaust” is part of a distinctive jargon designed to circumvent the problematic and controversial aspects of the process: the collection of personal, private information about individuals, most often without their informed consent, and its subsequent use for commercial purposes (for example, selling the data to specific advertising entities), and political purposes (the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the use of data from Facebook user profiles during the 2020 US presidential election).

The sculpture is divided into several spheres, and each of them tells a story about a different example of the spread of surveillance capitalism into further spheres of personal experience, for example:

– The urban reality game Pokemon Go not only collected behavioral data on female users to create the most perfect predictive products; in Pokemon Go, players were gently nudged to eat, drink, and shop at restaurants and stores that paid for the opportunity to participate in the market game of predicting future behavior

– Google Street View (Street View cars secretly collected personal data from private Wi-Fi networks)

– companies that create predictive products for corporate HR., (thanks to information from social media and publicly available databases, Machine learning models assign risk metrics to each employee, allowing the company’s customers to track employees who are the best and worst performers. They can then decide whether to retain an employee or decide to fire someone with “elevated risk” early.)

– The FIND MY KIDS app which can be used to track your child and eavesdrop on sounds from their environment