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July 27, 2026
Google Backstage: a look back at our Google escape room
For three months, Sherlocked ran an experience unlike anything in our regular lineup. Google Backstage lived in the basement of TQ, Amsterdam's tech hub in the heart of the city, and it wasn't about escaping a room. It was about understanding what happens to your data when you use Google's products, told through play rather than a privacy policy. Close to 2,000 people walked through it before the doors closed. Here's what they experienced.
Table of Contents
Two-Factor Authentication: The Entry Point
Every team started the same way: choose a password, then wait for a text message with a personal code, exactly how Google's two-factor authentication works in real life. Only the right code let a team through the door. It set the tone for everything that followed: nothing in Google Backstage was abstract. Each room translated a real Google privacy setting into something you could touch, throw, or climb.
Room One: YouTube and What You Choose to Share
The second room revolved around YouTube, and the choices its users make about their own data. Visitors met a set of fictional YouTube profiles, each shaped by what they watched or uploaded. Some had turned off data sharing entirely. That mattered in the next challenge: teams had to lob a ball at the video that matched a given user's profile, and the less a profile shared, the harder that got. Recommending anything to an incognito user, it turned out, was nowhere near as easy as Google makes it look.
Room Two: Google Maps, Built at Human Scale
The next room turned Amsterdam into a walk-through map, styled after Google Maps itself. Teams had to plot routes across the city, sometimes by forming a human chain, sometimes by climbing the wall to see the bigger picture. It was the most physical room in the experience, and the one that got the most laughs.
Room Three: Search, Without a Search Bar
Google Search makes finding anything look instant. This room asked visitors to do the opposite: dig through a room full of objects and find specific items within a set time, with no search bar to help. The more they found, the higher the score. It was a simple format that made a sharp point about how much invisible work sits behind a single search result.
The Round Up: Scores and Settings
The final stretch tallied up each team's points and walked them through what they had just experienced from a privacy standpoint, room by room. Anyone curious to look closer at their own Google privacy settings could do so here.
Vlogger Erik van der Ven captured the whole experience in 8K 360 video for his channel Around The World, so if you missed Google Backstage the first time round, that's the closest you'll get now.
Google Backstage ran for three months in TQ Amsterdam. Want to know what we're building next? Take a look at our current experiences.
