Ubisoft ‘Exploits’ Your Online Profile To Tout New Game
If you’ve ever taken a moment to sit down and give long, hard thought to all the information you’ve placed in the cloud since the dawn of the internet, you’d probably end up like one of those mental patients in American Horror Story Asylum. It’s kind of scary the trust we place in the intertubes. […]
If you’ve ever taken a moment to sit down and give long, hard thought to all the information you’ve placed in the cloud since the dawn of the internet, you’d probably end up like one of those mental patients in American Horror Story Asylum. It’s kind of scary the trust we place in the intertubes.
Perhaps as a reminder to this and, of course, to promote their new Watch Dogs game, Ubisoft is out with DigitalShadow, a site that scrapes your publicly available information from Facebook, the US Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor and Statistics to paint a true picture of who you are, who you care about, where you’ve been, what you are worth and how a person or organization might exploit this information against you.
All by logging in with Facebook.
We’ve all seen these scraper campaigns in action before but this one has a clandestine feel to it. It’s nefarious. It’s sneaky. And it’s actually insightful.
Offering up my Facebook credentials, DigitalShadow tells me I can be identified with 90% accuracy, my relationships are secure (that’s a good thing), who my online stalkers are, who overshares my stuff, what my outlook on life is based on the type of language I use (bleak, apparently because I’m always trashing ads), when I’m vulnerable based on my connectivity patterns, that I’m really easy to geo-locate, that my salary is far below what it actually is and, well, a whole lot of other stuff.
Of course at the end of it all, you’re encouraged to invite your friends, watch the game trailer and visit WatchDogs.com where you are further immersed in the game’s environment. It all flows very nicely pulling you into the game and effectively adjusting your mindset for that environment.
(Note: The game trailer below includes a couple song lyrics that may be considered NSFW.)
[youtube]http://youtu.be/r9yNUOA8RAk[/youtube]
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