Cookie scout was my project for my Magister's thesis at Malmö University. In this project I examined how and why users tend to ignore and accept web cookies and reflected upon how careful and conscious management of web cookies could be encouraged. As previous research had shown educative and utilitarian measures to be ineffective, I took another approach and turned to critical and discursive design to create a mobile game designed to act as a catalyst for reflection. In this mobile game of hide and seek, users try to find each other by examining the data trails gathered from their web cookies. Through more careful management of web cookies users become harder to find, while more careless behaviour leads to being found more easily. In this project I worked with auto-ethnographic research methods, user interviews and workshops. The prototype was created in Figma and Affinity Designer was used for creating the mock ups.
