Pedestrians entering the Nassau Street entrance at Trinity College, Dublin on Tuesday evening were greeted with a giant projection of a QR code, like a terribly geeky Bat signal. It was also displayed elsewhere around the university campus.
There was no explanation of what the QR code did but over 100 people scanned it out of curiosity and were led through a series of pages requesting different types of personal data.
90 percent offered up their name and gender but the most worrying part is that 27 percent entered details of medical conditions and their credit card number.
Luckily, the entire exercise was an part of a series of events for the College’s Data Protection Day, which took place yesterday. In an email to students, seen by TNW, the university’s Information Compliance Officer reassured anyone who took part that no personal data was actually collected or stored.
Still, the entire experiment is a welcome reminder to us all that we should be a little more reticent about offering up our personal information. Did we learn nothing from Jimmy Kimmel?
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