SENTIMENT — project-sentiment.org↗, since 2024, research project website and infrastructure, Next.js, TypeScript, headless CMS, MIT-licensed, © Domenik Töfflinger / httpjpg
Web development and infrastructure for SENTIMENT ("Sichere Selbstoffenbarung bei intimer Kommunikation mit Dialogsystemen"), an interdisciplinary research project funded under the German federal IT-security programme Digital. Sicher. Souverän., funding line Plattform Privatheit — IT-Sicherheit schützt Privatheit und stützt Demokratie
SENTIMENT studies what happens when people tell a chatbot something they would not tell most people. Large language models have made conversational systems fluent enough that the perceived boundary between an artificial and a human interlocutor thins out, and companies already market products as an "AI friend" with a romantic mode attached. Users respond with self-disclosure, reassurance, trust, affection — the vocabulary of intimacy — directed at a system that stores it. Psychologists, computer scientists, legal scholars and artists work together to assess the privacy risk in that exchange and to derive Privacy-by-Design mechanisms against it.
I built and maintain the project's public surface: the website, the article and team infrastructure, the exhibition presence and the deployment behind it. The constraint that shaped every decision is that a project arguing for data protection cannot be published on a platform that quietly contradicts it. Bot protection runs through ALTCHA, a proof-of-work challenge that keeps spam out without handing visitors to a captcha service that profiles them. The newsletter is GDPR-compliant by construction rather than by disclaimer. No behavioural tracking, no third-party embeds smuggling in identifiers, no consent theatre that presents surveillance as a choice already made.
The work also has to hold a second requirement: research communication is written by researchers, not by developers. Articles, conference announcements, team pages and press coverage are published by the project's own people across four disciplines and several institutions, so the system had to stay editable by non-developers while its type checks, linting, commit conventions and CI keep the codebase coherent across two years and several hundred commits. The website is not the research. It is the part of the research the public actually touches — which makes its own privacy posture an argument rather than a footnote.
INSTA)
)
)