We worked with noted media artist Kyle McDonald to create an experience showing you don’t actually have to be hacked to reveal personal information. We created the WiFi Whisperer, a persona built to capture and share the data that festivalgoers had no idea they were leaking. Here’s how it worked. When you connect to Wi-Fi, your smartphone sends out a data packet as it searches for familiar networks nearby, broadcasting your personal information. The WiFi Whisperer collected and deciphered this revealing digital biography, showcasing the results on four screens as a hidden speaker whispered its findings. Attendees logging onto the free festival Wi-Fi were served a message from the Whisperer, exposing what we now knew about them and other attendees.

The idea of unknowingly leaking your personal data is unsettling. We embraced this common fear, creating a persona with an eerie and mysterious voice whispering — in a very public display — the information that you assumed was private. Data scrolled across four screens as the WiFi Whisperer shared what it was learning about the people who had simply signed on to the free festival Wi-Fi.

During the three days of the festival, over 10,000 participants experienced the WiFi Whisperer and there were a total of 81 million PR impressions.

The purpose of the WiFi Whisperer was to show people just how much information they were sharing publicly without having the slightest idea they were doing so. By creating digital biographies of participants, the WiFi Whisperer served as a public service announcement for being smarter about the information you share.

• Data gathering

Smartphones are always trying to auto-join Wi-Fi networks to which they’ve previously connected. We exploited this feature by listening for probe request frames automatically sent by the phones of festivalgoers. We combined this information with pre-compiled databases of known Wi-Fi networks to determine where a phone had been and create a profile of the phone’s owner.

• Data interpretation

To illustrate how a little data could tell a huge story, we created a four-screen visualization to create narratives about individuals. One showed a dynamic force-directed graph of phones and networks. Another showed real-time network traffic from phones, and the other two used the information gathered to perform internet searches about the users.

• Targeting

Smartphones are all given names by their owner, e.g., Adrian’s iPhone. Whenever possible, we relied on this information as part of our synthesized audio soundtrack to lure people into exploring the full installation.

Since 2004, Moogfest has celebrated the intersection of music and technology, honoring the spirit of the festival’s namesake, Dr. Robert Moog, inventor of the Moog synthesizer and technological provocateur. In years past, the festival had been known more for attracting national electronic music acts, so this year the festival tasked us with highlighting its technology artists. We wanted to create an experience around one of the most relevant issues surrounding technology today: the hacking of personal data.