Watch Dogs Alternate Reality Game Accidentally Gives Users A Reason To Worry About Their Real World Privacy


Watch Dogs is a game that feeds on our connectedness and paranoia. It posits an ever-so-slightly tweaked version of the reality we know, and tells us it can be manipulated to no end.

The footage we saw at and after E3 has led into an ARG centering on the fictional art gallery owner Joseph Demarco and his gallery, dotconnexion. Today, the dotconnexion team announced the untimely “yet unexplained” demise of Mr. Demarco to everyone who had signed up to follow them. But when they did so, they gave participants a whole new reason to be paranoid.

For at least one thousand participants, the e-mails they received were not sent BCC. The blasts, which went to 500 players each, display each and every e-mail address to which they were sent. It appears the mistake was caught and corrected as the sender moved along the alphabet: forwards we’ve received from readers show the error from addresses beginning with digits and the letters A and B, but forwards from readers whose e-mail addresses begin with the letters I and M didn’t have the same problem.

Readers who alerted us to the issue report that they are now caught in reply-all hell, tangled in “a lengthy string” of unpleasant messages from strangers. That’s one way to tie the world of Watch Dogs deeply into the world we live in, but it’s probably not the way anyone wanted.


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