Tally Tracker Explorer

Tally Tracker Explorer is a visualization depicting live and archived game data from all players in Tally Saves the Internet, a browser extension that transforms the data that advertisers collect into a multiplayer game. Once Tally Saves the Internet is installed, a friendly pink blob named Tally lives in the corner of your screen and warns you when companies translate your human experiences into free behavioral data. When Tally encounters “product monsters” (online trackers and their corresponding product marketing categories), players can capture them in a turn-based battle (e.g. “Pokémon style”) and block trackers (acting as a progressive tracker blocker). Through use of Tally, players earn the right to be let alone through this playful experience.

Developed during COVID when people are increasingly online, Tally Tracker Explorer visualizes our collective internet activity and its data trails to offer a glimpse at the internet’s underbelly. Players can zoom in, out, left and right to find their own avatars and discover more about other player’s online behavior. Pressing the spacebar reveals the last eight monsters that each player encountered. Pressing L reveals a legend listing marketing categories and colors commonly used for each topic.

Both Tally Saves the Internet and Tally Tracker Explorer’s core goal is to visualize the internet in a way that makes the invisible trackers visible and the lingo familiar. As Harvard Professor Shoshana Zuboff, if you can name the parts of a system, you can understand it. If you can understand it, you can push for change.

This work is supported by NCSU Library's Immersive Scholar program.
Read more: https://github.com/sneakaway-studio/tally-tracker-explorer/