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A Study on ‘Dark Play’, a Dark Conspiracy of Social Media Game

  • Journal of Communication Design
  • Abbr : JCD
  • 2019, 68(), pp.126-136
  • DOI : 10.25111/jcd.2019.68.10
  • Publisher : CDAK Society of Communication Design
  • Research Area : Arts and Kinesiology > Design > Visual Information Design > Information Design
  • Received : June 10, 2019
  • Accepted : July 26, 2019
  • Published : July 31, 2019

Jungho Suh 1 HYUN JEAN LEE 1

1연세대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study is to examine the properties of ‘Dark Play’, a dark conspiracy that is presented in a personality-quiz app ‘ThisIsYourDigital Life’. Created by a team of Cambridge University psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, this alleged personality testing app is used to illegally harvest around 87 million Facebook users' personal data. The harvested data is wrongly used for 2016 Presidential Election, bringing worldwide criticism on the team. Based on this, this paper attempts to explain the unconsented play that was hidden under Aleksandr Kogan’s ‘ThisIsYourDigitalLlife’ in terms of Miguel Sicart’s Dark Play concept by examining the hidden conspiracy used in the Facebook game app. In addition, regarding problems of global Internet platforms such as Facebook‘s personal data commerce business that has gone through Datafication, this paper tries to examine in relation to Surveillance Capitalism of Bellamy Foster, Robert McChesney, Shoshana Zuboff and finally mentions the institutional needs for Digital Sovereignty.

Citation status

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