Ubisoft Will Mine Your Online Data to Creep You out in Their Watch Dogs Marketing Site
Who watches the watchdogs?
Ubisoft has put together a clever marketing site for their hacking-themed game, Watch Dogs. If you use Facebook, it will mine your data (and your friends’ data that they’ve shared with you) and present an eerie analysis of the type of person you are, your net worth, and which of your friends could be used against you.
At first, I didn’t see what was so creepy about this. Sure, it tries to sound ominous by referring to you as a “target” and identifying people that can be used against you, but I’m pretty sure geek bloggers are relatively low on the list for whatever covert operations would use this kind of data.
On top of that, you have to willingly log in with Facebook, so I was feeling pretty secure, since I keep nearly all of my Facebook activity just between friends.
But that’s where it gets you.
“Myself”? Apparently, we’re both huge narcissists. Thanks, Ubisoft.
When you log in, it can also access any of your friends’ data that you can see through Facebook. So it does a pretty solid job of driving home the point that, no matter how careful you are about privacy settings, your weakness is in how many other people have access to that data and could potentially spill it for you.
Luckily, it’s just a marketing ploy for a video game.
If you’ve got Facebook and a little bit of time to kill, it’s an interesting look about what your online social activity has to say about you. Of course, it also has the typical flaws of a computer personality profile, such as misidentifying context. For instance, three of my most commonly used words are polite terms, but it can’t account for how many times those are used sarcastically, which is probably at least a 60/40 split towards sarcasm.
(via Hot Hardware, image via my own screenshots)
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