What if purchasing gifts were automated for you?
Suveillance of our online behaviour has become increasingly present on most pages of the internet. The use of cookies and trackers to surveil and target commercials directly at you as a consumer, has become the new normal. Furthermore, digital devices help ease the life of their users - but at what costs?
This article from the New York Times explains how Amazon's smart voice assistant, Alexa, never stops listening to their users, and uses auditory keywords to target commercial products towards the user.
This project asks "what happens when taking surveillance and tracking to the extreme?". In short, the Zamona automates gift-purchasses by surveilling conversations on Facebook (and in a hypothetical scenario also IRL).
By connecting a user's Facebook account to the Zamona (a humerous anagram for "Amazon"), it utilizes an API from a user's collective Facebook chat-history and configures 1: what friends does the user chat with the most, and 2: product key-words in that chat (based off nouns). The Zamona then goes onto Amazon's online store and order gifts for the user online, based on the keywords tracked from the Facebook conversation. The Zamona device then lights green when the purchase has been fullfilled, after which a receipt is printed.
MAIN RESPONSIBILITIES
All stakehodlers in the project-team took part in ideation. My main responisiblity during this project was theoretical research and foundations as well as video-editing and designing the 3D-print prototype.
