A visualization depicting live and archived game data from Tally Saves the Internet including player activity, achievements, and the trackers following them in real time.
Tally Saves the Internet is a browser extension that transforms the data that advertisers collect into a multiplayer game. Once the browser extension 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) you can capture them in a turn-based battle (e.g. “Pokémon style”) transforming the game into a progressive tracker blocker, where you earn the right to be let alone through this playful experience.
Developed during COVID when people are increasingly online, Tally Tracker Explorer captures live data from Tally Saves the Internet and displays this data as a sea of avatars, each surrounded by small product monsters and attached to their unique data trails, colored to match their top marketing categories.
Both Tally Saves the Internet and Tally Tracker Explorer’s core goal is to visualize the internet and its trackers 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.
Sure it’s beautiful, but what does Tally Tracker Explorer tell me about anything? Tally Saves the Internet gives you much more accurate insights into how advertisers see you and gives you reminders about data tracking in the form of playful product monsters while you block trackers. What Tally Tracker Explorer does offer is a light-hearted visualization and collective spirit during this tough year of isolation, in and out of quarantine.
During COVID-19 quarantines, when we spend more time online, Tally Saves the Internet offers a way to reveal and re-envision the internet’s invisible structures as productive spaces for artistic interventions. As Klein and D’Agnozio describe in their 2020 book Data Feminism from MIT Press, if data is the new oil, those people who profit from this resource are thrilled while the rest of us range from indifferent to terrified. Tally offers its audience an alternative: it transforms advertising data into a multiplayer game that elevates emotion and alternative forms of embodiment as a way to examine power.
NC State’s Immersive Scholar Project Page https://tallytrackerexplorer.immersivescholar.org
Tally Tracker Explorer on Itch.io
The anonymized data included in this project comes from player activity on Tally Saves the Internet as a way to visualize how people are browsing the internet and being placed into the marketing categories by web trackers.
Each player is represented by their avatar floating through the sky with the following:
- Product monsters;
- Data trails (color from IAB Taxonomy);
- Player events, which include clicks, battles and badges from the game;
- Time span selected; and,
- A zoomed-in view of each player and some data (km scrolled and trackers blocked).
Don't know what a product monster is? See https://tallysavestheinternet.com/about
Open the application and it will start automatically. Pressing the following keys will open / close various panels:
- Control panel - Settings and controls
- Legend panel - A reference for the marketing taxonomy
- Timeline panel - Shows the time of the event being played and size of the history and buffer
- Feed panel - For debugging only (adds high performance overhead)
- ESC / Quit - Exit the application
| operation | keyboard | gamepad |
|---|---|---|
| zoom in | ↑ | left joystick ↑ |
| select players | ← or → | left joystick ← or → |
| zoom out | ↓ | left joystick ↓ |
- Settings - Set the resolution, fullscreen, and volume
- View FPS and resolution details
- Data - View the
statusand set the Mode (stop, set mode, then start):remoteLive- Automatically refresh with live data from the serverremoteArchive- Fetch a live dataset once (using selected endpoint) and shuffle between buffer / historylocalArchive- Same asremoteArchiveexcept it uses the archived data in the project (endpoint is disabled)
- Timeline - View the
status,historyandbuffercounts, and stop/start the application.
- Visualization - Unity 2020.1.2f, Universal Render Pipeline (URP)
- Game API - Node/Express
- More about our process
- Powerful computer (FAAAASST)
- High-quality display
- Fast internet connection
- Stereo speakers
- Control device like a wireless gamepad or keyboard
The visualization can adapt to any screen size. The project has been tested on the following devices:
| device | OS | resolution | aspect ratio | specs | notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Desktop | MacOS Catalina (10.15) | 3840 x 2160 | 16:9 | Mac Pro (2019)  |
No issues |
| NCSU Immersion Theater | Windows 10 Pro 64 | 6816 x 2240 | 3.04:1 | Dell Precision T7910 |
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| NCSU Game Lab | Windows 10 Pro 64 | 4800 x 1080 | 4.44:1 | Dell Precision T7910 |
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| NCSU Visualization Studio | Windows | 27053 x 2160 | 12.52:1 | --- | --- |
| iPad | iOS | 1536 x 2048 | 1.33 | iPad 3&4, Air 1&2, Mini 2&3 | --- |
Created by Sneakaway Studio (Joelle Dietrick and Owen Mundy) during an eight-week artist residency funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation through the Immersive Scholar program with the NC State University Libraries.
Supported by weekly, then bi-weekly residency meetings with an invaluable NC State support team, namely Micah Vandegrift, Walt Gurley, Hannah Rainey, Scott Bailey, and Colin Keenan. We are particularly grateful for Micah's support of Joseph Dasilva as a studio assistant. His knowledge of Unity was invaluable.
Many thanks to everyone involved with the October 2nd, 2020 Immersive Scholar Symposium: Data, Surveillance, and Privacy, hosted by NC State, especially Nick Merrill, Lauren Klein, Micah Vandegrift, Hannah Rainey, Ashley Evans Bandy, and Claire Cahoon.
For general questions or troubleshooting questions contact Walt Gurley.