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Thursday, April 26, 2012

Top Stories from the last 24 hours


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CinemaCon: Universal Offers First Glimpse of 'Les Miserables,' 'Oblivion'


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'Book of Mormon' Star in Talks to Play Steve Wozniak in Ashton Kutcher Steve Jobs Movie


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Q&A: James Cameron Considers Teaming With China for 'Avatar' Sequels

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The Hollywood Reporter International News Alert
  April 26, 2012
  Q&A: James Cameron Considers Teaming With China for 'Avatar' Sequels
 

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Tribeca Film Festival 2012 Award Winners: 'War Witch,' 'Una Noche,' Win Top Prizes


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'Fringe' Renewed for Fifth and Final Season


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Living in Public: What Happens When You Throw Privacy Out the Window

April 26th, 2012Top Story

Living in Public: What Happens When You Throw Privacy Out the Window

By Thorin Klosowski

Living in Public: What Happens When You Throw Privacy Out the WindowI am an extremely private person. I don't broadcast my location, I use privacy tools to keep advertisers from tracking me, and almost never give any app access to Facebook. Of course, a lot of people don't have a problem with living publicly. I've always wondered what the benefits and downfalls of doing so are, so I decided to give it a three-week test run. Here's how it went.

We've talked a lot about the importance of your privacy because your data is often used for ads you don't know about, logged in databases you've never heard of, and used to find out where you are and what you're doing. Some of the things I consider "radical public living" experiments are probably commonplace to you, but even so, my experience may give you a better insight into what you're gaining—and potentially losing—with your choices. Let's start by looking at my experiences with location-sharing every move I made and then move on to the data collected by my browser. Finally, we'll close by handing all this information over to a third party and seeing what type of demographic picture gets formed.

Broadcasting Every Move In the Real World

Living in Public: What Happens When You Throw Privacy Out the WindowLocation-sharing apps like Foursquare have been popular for a while, but I've never ventured down that path because I didn't like the idea of my friends (and strangers) knowing where I was, what I was eating, or who I was with. It just seems like an odd thing to broadcast to the world to me. However, I picked a few apps and started doing it anyway. Here's a breakdown of what I signed up for:

  • Foursquare for checking in to public places and letting everyone know where I am.
  • Forecast is a tool that checks you in automatically, which was important because I forgot to do it at first.
  • Banjo is an app that aggregates a variety of social feeds to update friends and strangers to where you are and what you're doing.
  • Set Locations/Permissions/Notifications for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook so they would display my location info publicly and interact properly with Banjo.
  • Spotify Sharing so that everyone knows what I'm listening to at every point in the day.

The theory behind these choices is pretty simple. I picked the most popular services because that's what all my friends use. Then, I used Banjo to make sure strangers know what I'm doing, and then enabled location sharing for all the apps I use (including the recently downloaded Instagram, because what's one more social network?). Finally, since I spend most of my day in front of the computer listening to music, I enabled the Spotify sharing feature for Facebook so everyone knows what I'm listening to all the time. So, what happened? Let's look.

The Good, the Bad, and the Weird of Living Completely Publicly

Living in Public: What Happens When You Throw Privacy Out the WindowThe whole purpose of broadcasting your location is so that friends can find you easily when you're out on the town (or you know, grocery shopping). It took me a few days before I was really comfortable checking in to places, and with Banjo telling me when friends were near me, I started to see why this could be helpful in some cases.

As someone who works from home, I need to get out of the house often, but sometimes after being here all day it's hard to get the willpower to leave. One night sitting at home I got a notification that my cousin had checked in at a local bar. I don't really talk to my cousin as much as I should, but I decided to give her a call since she was close and I met up with her. This was a prime example of how location sharing is supposed to work and a few similar circumstances happened as the weeks went on, including meeting up with a friend I didn't know was in town and sitting next to a friend I probably wouldn't have noticed was there at the movie theater. Kind of cool, right? Then, I got a little dose of the bad.

On a Saturday afternoon I decided I really didn't want to meet up with a friend for a planned dinner, so I texted him, told I was feeling a bit under the weather, and let it be. Then, later that evening, I checked in at restaurant for dinner, not thinking twice about the repercussions of this decision. Within 20 minutes of checking in I got a text message from him noting that I must be feeling better. It took me a minute to respond and I had to finagle the truth a little more to retain our friendship. Thankfully, this was the only big mistake I made, but it's a notable one. First off, lying to friends is stupid. Second, if you're going to do so, don't go out and broadcast what you're doing to the world.

Of course, it's not all good or bad. Some things that happen when everyone knows where you are can be a little weird. I had cookies delivered to me by a neighbor when I checked in at home one afternoon; I had an ex-girlfriend pop into a restaurant I was eating at to say "hi"; and on several occasions I had friends ask me how events were before I even mentioned I'd been to them.

Sharing my music listening habits was even stranger. For the most part, it was an uneventful process and I occasionally got a comment like, "That's a sweet album," but after a stint of listening to a ton of sad songs in a row, I had two people send me text messages to ask if I was doing okay. I was doing fine, but in retrospect I can see where the worries came from. Anyone that listens to that much of Nick Drake and Leonard Cohen in an evening probably needs at least a high five.

So it went over the course of three weeks. Some good experiences, some bad, and some just plain weird things happened. New research suggests that social networks make us lonely, and while I can see where that comes from, it's hard to deny how location sharing can also create spontaneous meetups. Of course, while I was sitting at home working or just watching a movie by myself I would see updates from friends in the area. I would think to myself, "I should go do something," and then promptly ignore that social call and return to my solitary behavior. In turn, I would feel a little guilty for not leaving the house, but not lonely.

Location-sharing is just one facet of my public experiment. The other involved allowing any website to track who I am, what I'm doing, and where I'm at. This basically just required me to remove a few extensions in Chrome and let the web do its thing for a few weeks. Photo by Kai Hendry.

Letting Websites Track and Collect All the Data They Want

Living in Public: What Happens When You Throw Privacy Out the WindowWe've talked extensively about how everyone's trying to track you online and have offered tons of great tips to keep it from happening. In turn, I enabled pretty much everything we've suggested in the past, including:

  • Privacy Controls on Facebook to ensure nothing was leaked out I didn't want.
  • Adblock Plus to block ads from tracking me.
  • Disconnect for Chrome to keep social network widgets from tracking me everywhere.
  • Ghostery to find and block the bugs that track my online movements.
  • Proxy Servers to make sure nobody knows where I really am.
  • Secondary Email Addresses for Testing and Purchases to cut down on spam and remain somewhat anonymous.

I don't really do anything illegal, but I've always had an issue with being used as a marketing guinea pig. So, I did my best to make sure my information isn't private by disabling the above extensions and settings. This helps guarantee that my actions are 100 percent public.

Data Collected as Shown by Collusion and Ghostery

The amount of data collected about me in Collusion and Ghostery is impossible to assess in a meaningful way, but rest assured my browsing data was being sent to all ends of the Earth. Collusion's map (shown above) has cookies going everywhere, and Ghostery maxes out its bug tracking at 820 different bits of information going to 820 different sites. My data might only be worth $4.81 to Facebook, but that data still defines who I am. From my point of view the only end result from all this is personalized ads.

Experiences with Personalized Ads and Real Email Addresses

Living in Public: What Happens When You Throw Privacy Out the WindowNo matter how long they've been around, personalized advertisements still creep me out. I realize it's part of the ecosystem that helps companies grow, but at the same time, it's strange to me that just because I look at some housewares I have to suddenly be inundated with other housewares.

Which is the other problem. I did not actually click on any ads and purchase anything, but ads did remind me of things that existed that I wanted. For instance, while shopping to replace a bunch of furniture in my living room, I was hitting up all kinds of furniture websites and looking at a wide variety of different new stuff. When all was said and done, I was happy with the results, but something was missing. Then, like a message sent from heaven, Facebook ads started telling me about rugs. I didn't buy any of the rugs advertised, but I did eventually buy one from elsewhere.

I also switched all of my online accounts, stores, and bills over to my Google email address, just to get a better glimpse at how Gmail's ad system works. As you can see from the image on the left, it turns out Gmail thinks I really like pizza, as pizza ads were the most popular to pop up in all of emails. For what it's worth, I do rather enjoy pizza, but still, this seems a little excessive and certainly didn't make me want to order from any of these places.

In the end, the most curious thing to me is that the more personalized the ads became, the less effective they were at selling a specific product. They could absolutely trigger a "buying state" from my brain where I wanted to purchase something but I had no interest in the specific product being mentioned. Granted, this experiment made me very aware of the targets ads and how they worked. They could have been more effective if I wasn't thinking about them so much.

The Shocking Portrait Built from this Data

Living in Public: What Happens When You Throw Privacy Out the WindowNone of this privacy talk really means much unless all this data forms a cohesive picture. To figure out what type of person I'm projecting myself as to both friends and advertisers I turned over my computer and phone to a complete stranger, my neighbor's sister, and gave her 30 minutes to take a look at all the publicly available material to see what she thought of me. Here's what she has to say:

Based on your check-ins and location info I'd say you either work from home, are unemployed, or you only check-in at places where you might run into someone. Probably work from home and not unemployed though because you seem to eat out a lot. The fact you don't check-in with anyone else or have any pictures of people makes me think you're single. Well, that and the fact it doesn't say anything on Facebook. It also seems like you and your friends drink a lot because that's the only place you seem to check in at. Actually, you don't seem to leave the house much at all except for bars or restaurants.

From the advertisements on your browser that I could see I would guess you might have just remodeled your house or you're thinking about doing so. You buy movies, music (based on the amount of songs you listen to), video games, and pizza. Apparently you had some foot disease at some point. The Collusion thing also makes me think you're interested in technology. As a demographic target I'd say you're in that 25-35 range (to be clear, she saw me in person, so the age range was probably pretty easy to assess), probably educated, unmarried, maybe lower-middle class. Oh, and you're in Denver. That's kind of cheating but it's pretty obvious.

A lot of her assumptions are correct (although I haven't had any foot diseases, I didn't think I liked eating out, and I'm not an alcoholic) and they echo pretty much the same thing demographic spot that Google has me in (you can see your own here). Google, however, also thinks I'm also interested in "Candy & Sweets" for some reason. Photo by thierry ehrmann.

How This Changes My Perception of Privacy

Living in Public: What Happens When You Throw Privacy Out the WindowThree weeks isn't enough time to gauge any lasting mental effects. I'm not aiming to cry wolf on any of these services, but I can say with certainty that this experience has convinced me to return to my private life, but with a few tweaks. Location sharing, for instance, isn't all bad news. While I can't imagine myself getting into the idea of being a Mayor in Foursquare it's still an interesting way to keep in touch with friends, especially when you're working from home and those spontaneous moments of running into somebody are rare.

However, as far as the more open apps are concerned—like Banjo, which just broadcasts where I am to everyone—I've already deleted them from my phone. I've also stopped broadcasting location info for photos and Twitter. As I see it, I'm already a random person wandering around my neighborhood; I don't see the point in being a random person with a publicly available profile for all to see.

As for my web browsing. I'll be returning to my hidden ways. I see the potential value in personalized ads, but they didn't really do anything except prompt me to think about making purchases I didn't need to make for products I didn't care about. I'm also so averse to direct ads that I'm actually less likely to buy something I see an ad for.

So is it really important to care about your privacy? Yeah, it is. We all know, for example, that broadcasting your location when you're not at home is problematic (for obvious reasons) and if you do that in full view of everyone, it's even worse. The key is locking down that information and using it specifically with friends you know and trust then leaving the rest of the data off public profiles.

How about you, have you given in and let your privacy slip away? Share your experiences in the comments.

Title image remixed from doglikehorse (Shutterstock) and Yuri Arcurs (Shutterstock).

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18 Things About Dishonored That You Should Know

April 26th, 2012Top Story

18 Things About Dishonored That You Should Know

By Stephen Totilo

18 Things About Dishonored That You Should KnowEarlier this week, I received a wood-framed clock in the mail. It was a promotional tchotchke from the people making Dishonored, the kind of thing a big video game company sends a gaming reporter to make sure they remember their game exists—and perhaps to cultivate some favorable emotions about the game.

It is, of course, a bit weird. What does one do with this unrequested clock?

It's also unnecessary, because Dishonored needs no clock to help me remember it, and won't need a clock for you to give a damn about it.

Dishonored is an ambitious game made by some talented folks in Texas. It's a first-person game that you can play as an action blockbuster or as a stealth adventure. It might remind you of some other very good games, but it has lots of distinct flair.

Raphael Colantonio and Harvey Smith, the game's co-creative directors at Arkane Studios, showed me the game in New York City last week. I watched as one of their colleagues played an early mission. They played through it twice, to show the flexibility of the Dishonored experience. I won't give you a blow-by-blow. Instead, I'll tell you what jumped out at me:

  1. The prevailing fantasy in this game is to be a "supernatural assassin". So picture a first-person game in which you might emit magical powers with your left hand, slit throats with your right, while jumping/warping from rooftop to rooftop and then possessing the person next to the guy you've been assigned to kill.
  2. The game is set in a beautiful, strange city called Dunwall, which had its look designed by Viktor Antonov and Sebastien Mitton, the former being the artist who conceived the look of Half-Life 2's City 17. They're going for a mid 1850s America look mixed with Victorian England. Dash in a bit of whaling town, and don't call it Steampunk, because it's not exactly that. There will be no rivets or brass in this game, Antonov mentioned, at least as a general goal. There's also no clear sense of day or night, because they want players to feel more of a dreamlike mood where it could always be sort of either time.

    18 Things About Dishonored That You Should Know


  3. You may peek through any door that has a keyhole as you skulk through the game, which tells you plenty about the level of technology in this game's world and the game developers' interest in letting you snoop. The main level we were shown was set in the Golden Cat Bathhouse, which, you can imagine, would have some secrets on the other side of its keyholes.
  4. You can possess a fish, thanks to the game giving you the power to possess any living thing, including the people you're trying to save, the people you're trying to kill or even the rats scurrying at their feet. This is one thing that qualifies you as a "supernatural assassin."
  5. If you possess a rat, a guard might step on you. Just know that you can't possess anything or anyone forever; only for a few seconds.
  6. This is a linear game with more powers than you can get in one playthrough. It's a game that will have you acquiring special powers, attaining more potent versions of them, accruing weapons. Basically, you're building your own arsenal that suits your strategy and the whole point of the developers showing me the same level twice was to show how differently you could handle it, depending on your abilities and interests.
  7. In this game, there are lots of ways to do the same thing.Take the Bathhouse building I saw during the demo. It's where the action was going to be. And while we could possess a fish to go inside, there were supposedly seven other ways to get in there, too.

    18 Things About Dishonored That You Should Know


  8. One of your best powers is called Blink. It lets you scoot forward a few yards in space, like a short-distance warp. Combine this with agile jumping and you can dart not just across rooftops but through open space, suddenly appearing in a crowd or getting to the other side of an open doorway without ever walking past it.
  9. One of the powers they didn't mean to give players, but did involves free-falling from the top of a building but then possessing a guard before you smack into the ground. The designers said that their test players figured it out and it seemed too terrific to remove. So, yeah, kill a guy on a balcony, and then jump off the balcony before his bodyguards can seize you, drop a few stories but body-hop into a regular citizen who is walking down the street in the nick of time.
  10. You can see where your enemies see if you activate a special power that causes their vision cones to be visibly emitted from their eyes. If they see you, trouble. If they see a painting on a wall, they might comment about it.
  11. If you have to compare this to another game, think more Deus Ex than BioShock. Co-creative director Smith waved off my guess that all these player powers mixed with combat might make BioShock the closest apt comparison to Dishonored. No, think more of the Deus Ex games, he said (and, hey, he was one of the main creators on the first two, so it all makes sense). The difference? As far as I can tell, while both games offer the players lots of choices, Dishonored offers a wider range of them and is more explicitly designed to let you play in stealth.
  12. And with your right hand you will kill, because that's the hand that will wield the games guns and blades. The first person melee combat you'll do with the knife got me wondering about another comparison, to Colantonio's former project Dark Messiah: Might & Magic but he said that game's focus on first-person melee is not exactly replicated here. There will be a block and counter system in Dishonored, but not one with Dark Messiah's depth.

    18 Things About Dishonored That You Should Know


  13. Two corrupt aristocrats needed killing in the level I was shown. These brothers, the Pendleton Twins, are two of the many scumbag aristocrats who are keeping the people of Dunwall down while trying to avoid whatever mysterious illness is now plaguing the lower classes.
  14. You, by the way, are Corvo Attano, former bodyguard of the Empress, wrongly accused of her murder.
  15. You can dispose of your targets in many ways, some of them fatal, some of them wickedly clever. Imagine, say, you discover one Pendleton Twin in a room with a prostitute. You may walk in and shoot him or knife him or summon a pack of rats to eat him (and possess one of those rats while you're at it). But you also could have never entered the room and just locked it, turned up the steam in his room and boiled him alive. But why not just help out a local crime boss by breaking into the Bathhouse and finding the combination to a safe he wants access to. Give him the combo and he'll take care of the Pendletons by shaving their heads and sending them to work in the mines they ruthlessly run. You know, you don't have to give the crime boss the combo before you go open that safe yourself and take what's in it. This game is supposed to be open to any branch you can imagine taking. You're expected to experiment.
  16. You could go through the game without killing anyone, but then you'd never have approached the second Pendleton twin, poisoned him, possessed him, walked him over to the balcony, jumped out of his body (yours appears when you do this), pushed him over the edge and then bailed.
  17. The world will adapt to you, Smith told me, saying that you might hear different conversations or see more guards or even witness entirely different scenes of squalor or hope depending on how brutally you're playing. He refrained from describing any pat formula, so I couldn't tell if playing without killing, for example, equals seeing more cheerful things. It seems like they're going for something subtler than that. We'll have to see how that plays out.
  18. The walkers you'll remember seeing are called Tallboys. They appeared in a more action-heavy sequence that took place in an area called The Flooded District. There are men in those powerful walkers and, yes, you can possess them.

18 Things About Dishonored That You Should Know


Click to view Dishonored showed well. Its world is vivid and interesting and it does appear to offer a good range of play styles that will let players figure out just how bloody they want their revenge quest to be. All games are best judged when you play them yourselves, doubly so for malleable games like this that are pitched as letting you dabble and push at its seams to see what's possible.

This is the kind of game that entices you to try and break it. Say, let's see what happens if I try to kill this guy this way or try to finish this level as a rat!

This, therefore, is the kind of game it's easy to get excited about. No clocks necessary, though I should mention who sent the timepiece. Arkane is owned by Bethesda/Zenimax, the Skyrim people. They know how to push games, so you're going to be hearing a lot more about this one—with good reason.

Dishonored will be out later this year for PlayStation 3, Xbox 360 and PC.

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