Watch_Dogs WeAreData

kehkou

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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.
Sounds cool, right?
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.
Then it gets a little creepy...
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.
:wtf: Just goes to show how everything really is connected.

:arrow: Sauce
:arrow: Site

MODS: If this has been posted already, please delete/move it. I searched and found nothing.
 

FAST6191

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I saw a video of it and it looked interesting. Even dropping my security I could not get it to work for me though.
 

Gahars

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With the Snowden leaks and everything, it's kind of funny how prescient Watch_Dogs turned out to be. Did Ubisoft get lucky with the timing or what?
 

kehkou

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I saw a video of it and it looked interesting. Even dropping my security I could not get it to work for me though.
I had to eff around with the setting (refreshing, compatability view). I can view the local stuff like CCTV and the bikes, didn't see any Twitter though (maybe cuz I don't use it).
 

Cyan

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I like the idea behind the "all is connected", they map all public informations to a city using different, individual, services to make a global social website connectivity.
It's creepy, but all the informations are already available, they only link them together.

I checked Paris city, some data are nice (real time free bike availability, metro, flickr), and other are wrong or missing (traffic lights seems not correctly placed, but they don't have any interesting interaction)
If they could list public webcams it would be great too!


It makes me remember some futuristic movies/anime I watched with global network service : Eden of the East, Dennou Coil
I think it could be expanded and used for real life usage (using google glasses, or smart phones apps for example).
 

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