Digital Shadow knows your secrets

Digital Shadow knows your secrets

by Gary Oldwood on 25 April 2014 · 2605 views

You are not an individual, you are a data cluster.

Ubisoft has been making users anticipate Watch Dogs for a while now but until it gets released in May 27, fans (and not only) were given a small gift to play with- an app called Digital Shadow(Note: an action-adventure video game with a plot that involves a lot of hacking and surveillance).

Digital Shadow Knows You Better Than You

Digital Shadow is a marketing campaign made by Ubisoft that creates a shockingly detailed profile of you based on data scrapped from your Facebook account. Currently it’s only available in U.S. so don't get surprised if you're not permitted to use it (you could always use a U.S. proxy however, hehe).

To start using the online application, visit http://digitalshadow.com/shadow.php and let the page load. After watching the animations that look like they came out of a movie, you can click on the Facebook login button in order to let the app access your Facebook account (of course it would, you can’t expect it to hack into Facebook- although that would take it to another level of awesomeness) and that’s when the fun starts. Your digital portrait will be created as if you were an assassin’s target and includes diagrams and pie charts.

To be more precise, it will display your “Pawns” (users on Facebook you regularly interact with), your “Obsessions” (people you stalk) and also your “Stalkers” (people who stalk you, obviously). It will also tell you when you are most active on Facebook, your location (whether you include it in your Facebook profile or not) as well as estimate your salary based on your educational level and job. Those are some cool and entertaining results, but you haven't seen the best part yet.

It seems that I'm most vulnerable on Saturday mornings.

Digital shadow will examine all your posts and evaluate their worthiness to advertisers and marketers. Having a higher digital value means that you exposed yourself more to the world (not a good thing if somebody wants you dead). But even the words in your posts will be analyzed too, and Digital Shadow will tell you which words you use more frequently in order to create a small profile of yourself and characterize you as volatile, depressive, deviant, neurotic or submissive. As for me, Digital Shadow said that I’m “submissive”- a conformist that demonstrates compliance, and I will be governable if pressured.

Submissive, huh?

Although it’s just a well-made application that Ubisoft created to promote Watch Dogs, it’s still hinting at the fact that no matter how many security settings you activate you’ll never be safe enough; that’s why you should always be careful of the content you share online. It can and will be used against you.

Check out Digital Shadow's trailer:

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