Exhibition “What’s It to You?” (2023)

Digital platforms and applications dislike secrets.

They track us from prenatal stages to death. Often, they wrap their terms of use in complex legal language, typically only in English. Today, living an analog life is almost impossible and unimaginable, while managing one’s own digital footprint is increasingly challenging.

Scientific research rarely takes on a playful exhibition form that spontaneously draws children and adolescents into dialogue. The exhibition What’s It to You?! is based on research involving more than 3,000 Slovenian children and young people and questions whether we truly grant digital corporations consent for such uses and misuses of our data. Today, advertisers capture the life of an average thirteen-year-old through as many as 72 million data points. The research by Katja K. Ošljak and Rys Farthing highlights that it’s not only social networks but also school applications that track children’s activities, even outside the classroom. The study emphasizes young people’s demands for greater online protection, and the exhibition allows visitors, among other things, to directly present their demands to EU decision-makers.

The honorary patron of the exhibition is the Minister for Digital Transformation, Dr. Emilija Stojmenova Duh.