Privacy playground¶

Welcome to the Greenhouse Games. These are simple, playful ways to explore digital privacy and security, made to be picked up with whatever you have to hand and adapted as you go. Think of them as seeds: each one can be planted as described, but the most interesting growth tends to happen when you start adjusting the conditions to suit the garden you actually have.

The games fall into three groups. No need to play them in order, and no need to understand anything about the internet before you start. Wherever you begin, bring a willingness to be surprised by how the game turns out.

And the most useful thing you can do after playing any of these games is spend five minutes talking about what surprised you. Not what the game is supposed to teach, but what actually happened: the moment the Tracker turned out to be more effective than anyone expected, the passphrase that was easier to remember than anyone thought, the metadata that gave away far too much. Experience turns into understanding during that conversation, not during the game itself.

If you are playing with children, the question “what would you do differently next time?” tends to work better than asking what was learned. It keeps the frame in the garden, where the emphasis is on trying things and adjusting, rather than in the classroom, where the emphasis is on getting things right.