Digital Privacy Risk Estimator

Inspiration

The inspiration for this project was our own lack of understanding of digital privacy. While brainstorming, we realized that other people may also be unaware of the different ways to keep their data private.

What it does

This application takes you through a series of questions considering your own habits around digital privacy. Along the way, we offer advice about how to be more secure online. As you answer the questions, your data privacy score is calculated to find your risk level.

How we built it

We built our project using three of the fundamental programming languages of web development. These include HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. We used HTML to build the structure of the website, while CSS was used to implement the cool designs that are on the display. Last but not the least, JavaScript was used to deal with the progress on the risk scale depending on what the user input was received for each question.

Challenges we ran into

The risk scale at the bottom of the screen presented our biggest challenge. Not only did we need to dynamically move the indicator as the user answered questions, but we also needed to make it look good. Coordinating between team members so that the JavaScript worked seamlessly with the HTML presented another challenge for us to navigate through. Through team collaboration, we were able to create a beautiful and functional risk scale.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Some of the accomplishments that we were able to achieve include creating our minimum viable product and more. We are very proud of the UI and functionality of our final product, especially our ability to build a project that revolves around digital privacy, with which we have very little experience.

What we learned

During this project, we learned how to work as a team. Most of us were fairly new to the hackathon experience and coding as a team was something new to us. Throughout the hackathon, we worked on tasks within sub-teams and then regrouped to provide updates to the rest of the team, solve issues, and efficiently make progress. One of the main things that we learned throughout this project was how difficult creating a website can be, especially linking pages and formatting when each of us was working on different versions of our final product.

What's next for Digital Privacy Risk Estimator

Our application will continue to inform users of the risks presented to their data from their online habits. An expansion of this project could include more tools to protect users, such as analyzing whether an internet connection is secure. We could also create an account system with a database for users to analyze how their risks have changed over time, or we could incorporate data breach websites to show users whether their data may be at risk.