“The Twitterverse can be tricky to navigate if you don’t know your way around. So we made a game to help you understand our privacy policy a little better,” explains Twitter on the game’s page. The 8-bit game centres around you and your dog Data, as you navigate around PrivaCity. Your task is to get Data safely to the park, dodging cat ads and battling trolls. In theory, it’s a novel idea that may help younger users and bored adults to gain a better understanding of the complex policies that govern today’s platforms. But in my experience, it just left me more confused. As someone who enjoys the nitty-gritty details of platform policies, laws and regulations, there’s just far too much obfuscation to get any real sense of how any of this could be applied to controlling your personal data in the real world. Twitter’s time may be better spent making its privacy controls easier to access and simplifying its policies to make it easier to understand.
