The Gavin Project

Hello everyone!

Welcome to TheGavinProject.com. This site was made by a group of students from Brad Rosen’s Control, Privacy, and Technology course at Yale University (Computer Science 185) for our final project.  Our goal in compiling this project was to determine the answer to two questions: “what source of personal information is the most revealing?” and “which source of personal information would you least like to reveal to the world?”

To answer the first question, we found a volunteer, “Gavin”, willing to give up his personal information for the sake of this social experiment, on the condition of anonymity.  We gained access to and searched through his email, cellphone, Facebook account to compile into a dossier of personal information.  In addition, we performed several Google searches to determine what information could be learned without access to private resources.

This website shows some of the information obtained from each source.  By clicking on the links in the navigation header or sidebar, you will be able to determine for yourself which source contains the most personal information.  Because the information available here is for the general public, it has been anonymized as much as possible.  Throughout this project, all of us learned more than we ever knew or cared to know about Gavin.

In addition to invading Gavin’s privacy, we conducted a survey of our peers to gain a sense of just how much we value each of our sources of private information, particularly our cell phone, email, and Facebook account.  A summary of the results as well as some analysis of the data can be found by clicking the link in the navigation header or on the sidebar

Since this site is available publicly, we wished to respect the privacy of Gavin.  As such, some of the information we discovered has been redacted, either for privacy reasons or to help anonymize Gavin.   There is additional information available to those in academia who may be interested in using it for research.  If you are interested and believe you have a valid purpose in obtaining this additional information, please email TheGavinProject AT Airizel.net with proof of academic purpose to obtain the dossier with a more in-depth and itemized list of facts discovered.

You may be wondering who put together TheGavinProject.com.  We are a group of Yale students concerned with privacy, technology, and the issues of the internet:

Jeonghyun Kim – Class of 2011
Julie Shain – Class of 2013
Matthew Everts – Class of 2013
Michael Clemente – Class of 2011
Sebastian Park – Class of 2013
Zachary Maher – Class of 2013

We must also thank Gavin for his donation of his personal information. Without him this project would not have been possible.

Follow us on Twitter @TheGavinProject ! You can also read a bit more about us on the YaleLawTech Blog by clicking here.

Thank you for visiting our website and we hope you learn a bit more about just how much of our information can be obtained through the internet.

-The Gavin Project.com Team