WeareData -- a promotional website for Ubisoft's Watch Dogs game -- gathers urban and unprotected personal information to create an interactive real-time map of European cities.
Offering detailed data on London, Paris and Berlin the site pulls up a 3D map which can be investigated as it continually pulls fresh information from publicly available sources such as unprotected social media accounts.
The game's fictitious version of Chicago is a fully realised smart city run by an overbearing Central Operating System (CTOS) that uses data to control the city and manage potential problems like traffic, crime and power distribution. One of the aims of the website is to draw parallels between the masses of data available for manipulation in our own urban reality and that of Watch Dogs' setting.
The information being used in WeareData splits into a number of categories. One is public service information -- for London that's things like Tube trains which you can watch chugging across the city as little blobs, and Boris bikes. Another is electronic equipment -- so CCTV cameras, ATMs and traffic lights. There's also statistical information on the area such as unemployment rates, crime rates and so on.
Perhaps most interesting given the context in which Watch Dogs now finds itself marketed (i.e. so-accidentally-well-timed-someone-should-probably-be-sounding-the-post- PRISM-zeitgeist-klaxon), is the social data.
Ubisoft is at pains to point out that all the personal content in use on the site is publicly available via site APIs and other open data sources. Protected data like private Twitter accounts is not pulled in. But that still leaves vast pools of information.
Geotagged Flickr and Instagram pictures pop up, as do geolocalised tweets. Connecting via Facebook adds a metadata layer with information about the website itself.
Looking through the available data in the middle of the night gave a curious snapshot of London -- a picture of a man with a satsuma in his beard, borderline incoherent tweets about various nights out and the new mayor of a bakery (on FourSquare at least).
It was interesting to see the difference geographical context makes to social media with vastly different experiences and moods sitting side by side. At one point I clicked on a blue cluster of tweets thinking it might be a lot of people at an event. It turned out to be the glow of a girl spamming her feed with a passive-aggressive rant about a man who had irked her. I was also able to locate my own house by checking tweets in the vicinity.
Highlighting our online visibility is one of the site's functions. It manifests most obviously in the initial impact of opening your chosen city with all options selected and seeing so many data points and clusters of activity. There's a hubbub of colour demonstrating how available we make the details of our lives.
But as you dig through the material it becomes a more nuanced experience -- something closer in spirit to an art installation.
You start mentally sorting the material, working out whether individual elements are useful, whether they belong in the public domain, what's prurient and what should be left hidden.
In terms of its relationship to the game and in light of the leaked NSA, GCHQ and Socmint data surveillance practices, WeareData could go a lot further in raising the vulnerability point. In the game itself, CTOS is a negative, overbearing force. The real-life version presented by the accompanying site, not so much. However, with Ubisoft planning to keep the project running beyond just a launch gimmick window, a spokeperson notes there's the scope for exploring other, more worrying ideas and those who opt in will be able to see their movements and interactions mapped around the city using Google Latitude.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
