Speculative data selfies

This short piece examines Data Selfie, an open-source Chrome browser extension that collects and analyses data about your behaviour on facebook.com. The extension has been developed by DATA X (Hang Do Thi Duc and Regina Flores Mir) and was originally announced in April 2016 as an iPhone app and a Chrome browser extension. The latter was released in January 2017 and has since gained traction from technology blogs (e.g., Fast Co. Design, The Next Web, Mashable, and Big Think) and has already been installed by over 70,000 users (Chrome Web Store). In this piece we briefly describe how Data Selfie works, what data it does and does not collect, what kind of data profiles or "selfies" it generates, and what type of data awareness raising strategy it employs.