People in Manchester can get a free coffee this week, in exchange for something they may not expect – a little personal information.
The Ethical Dilemma Café, which is being run by the BBC and web giant Mozilla, will ask visitors personal questions, such as ‘when did you last sing to yourself?’, or ‘for what in your life do you feel most grateful?’ – and only by revealing a certain amount about themselves will visitors be able to exchange those answers for a free drink.
Visitors will find the Ethical Dilemma Café on the site of the Feel Good Club on Hilton Street, which is being taken over this Tuesday and Wednesday by the BBC’s Research & Development department and web giant Mozilla as part of the company’s global technology festival MozFest.
Open from 11am to 9pm on Tuesday 26th and 9am to 5pm on Wednesday 27th, The Ethical Dilemma Café will be asking people to think about the value of their personal data, encouraging them to explore and understand the power of their data and algorithms, and how those shape our world today.
In addition to offering free coffee, The Ethical Dilemma Café will feature a range of things to see and do, and will host a number of talks and workshops all around the theme of personal data.
Manchester Exhibits include:
- The Data Loom – operated by Open Data Manchester – in which people’s personal data will manually encoded and weaved into cloth over the two days the café is open, creating a physical garment from personal info
- The Prometheus Terminal – an interactive arcade game form the University of Lancaster where players take on the role of a hacker and must navigate the environmental effects caused by their data footprints whilst carrying out a cyber-attack on Edge-IoT devices
- Presence Robots – people who aren’t at the event will still be able to physically visit after a fashion by inhabiting a robot that will be there, as part of BBC R&D’s experimental concept of a “reverse metaverse” – giving people in remote digital settings a local physical presence
- Fantasy vs Reality Newspaper – a newspaper depicting the contrast between memes and news during the pandemic from Mozilla
- The Caravan of the Future – an interactive environment showing what the next level of smart home technology might look like in the near future, all deployed in a custom built caravan
There are also a range of talks and workshops across both days of the Ethical Dilemma Café.
Tuesday’s schedule is;
And on Wednesday;
More information and MozFest tickets are available here.
