The Creators Of Pokemon Go Mapped The World. Now They're Mapping You

Cecilia D'Anastasio and Dhruv Mehrotra report via Kotaku: Today, when you use Wizards Unite or Pokemon Go or any of Niantic's other apps, your every move is getting documented and stored -- up to 13 times a minute, according to the results of a Kotaku investigation. Even players who know that the apps record their location data are usually astonished once they look at just how much they've told Niantic about their lives through their footsteps. For years, users of these technologists' products -- from Google Street View to Pokemon Go -- have been questioning how far they're going with users' information and whether those users are adequately educated on what they're giving up and with whom it's shared. In the process, those technologists have made mistakes, both major and minor, with regards to user privacy. As Niantic summits the world of augmented reality, it's engineering that future of that big-money field, too. Should what Niantic does with its treasure trove of valuable data remain shrouded in the darkness particular to up-and-coming Silicon Valley darlings, that opacity might become so normalized that users lose any expectation of knowing how they're being profited from.

not spying on me...

[sdinfoserv]

Never installed it, nor any other app from that company.

Not suprised

[whoever57]

Niantic are a bunch of a**holes.

Some years ago, I was trying to get them to remove some Pokemon Go stops and they either silently ignored my requests or provided bogus reasons to not comply. These were stops on private property where there was actually construction taking place. Both private and dangerous.

And, yes, it was fenced and marked.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep. When I asked if they would move a spawn point that was literally in a suburban kitchen to maybe down on the corner where the local kids could congregate safely and freely, they said there was no such thing as spawn points. Therefore it was impossible to move or change or delete a spawn point. Refused to reply when further queried on the matter.

They claimed that the pocket monsters spawned randomly everywhere, not at particular places. It was and is obviously a brazen lie that every single player w

Re:

[RJFerret]

That might be solvable now after the court case which recently completed. They had to make an easy form for submission and any POI withing 100m of a private residence has to be removed.

Re:Not suprised

[johnjones]

thanks the links are :

https://www.pokemongolive.com/report-location

https://variety.com/2019/gaming/news/niantic-pokemon-go-class-action-settlement-1203141082/

Honey, I can explain

[93 Escort Wagon]

There’s been quite a few Charizard appearing at my ex-girlfriend’s house!

Hmmm - I wonder if blockchain...?

[jimbrooking]

It's an interesting thought experiment to see how or if every piece of data collected about a person could itself be tracked through every entity that possesses it, whether or not the entity sells or (another breadcrumb on the trail of the datum), saves it (I'm looking at you, NSA) or gives it away (CIA to MI5/6 to ?). If an entity sells it twice, a fork is born newly to be tracked. IIRC the US Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) mandates that an individual has the right to know wha

Common Fallacy - Overvaluation of Data

[Jack9]

> Should what Niantic does with its treasure trove of valuable data

The valuable data is what they have mapped and can provide in APIs, not in the months+old personal data. That has little value that diminishes quickly over time.
Monetizing old user data is INSANELY hard to do and nobody does it well. Near-realtime you can do some targeting, but Niantic will need a year or two to build the proper monetization infrastructure and they frankly don't seem that smart. Not that it's super hard platform to create, but they just don't have the sophistication or will from an administrative level.

Re:

[demonlapin]

The location data is valuable for blackmail. Worthless to the corp (they have to operate under the laws), valuable to hackers who know their quarry.

Spent a few hours at a random hotel or apartment? How much is it worth for your wife not to know about that?

Re:

[gTsiros]

a year or two...

so are the 6 years since the closed beta for ingress, niantic's previous ar game, enough?

Color me outraged

[Waccoon]

And yet, the biggest response you'll get from most people over this corporate spying BS is a collective "Meh."

Re:

[tinkerton]

In the process, those technologists have made mistakes, both major and minor, with regards to user privacy.

As msmash kindly explains , these are mistakes, not business models.
But that is /. mainstream editors for you. I think Shoshanna Zuboff is closer to truth when she says that it is the actual business model, and she goes to point out that the business model includes not just harvesting their data but also tuning people's behaviour, using the pokemons to make them go places and getting money from the peo

Do people still play PG?

[antdude]

I don't know anyone who does anymore. They used to be addicted.

The Matrix.

[Forty Two Tenfold]

So it really exists. And it is ultimately the power of information, not electricity, that runs it.

So, where is the investigation?

[atisss]

I am player of Niantic games for more than 6 years, as far as I can tell - they are logging your interactions at certain points of interest, but not every location.
You can actually send GDPR request to them, and you will get your history back - many have done so, and there are only interactions that you intentionally do.

There are things like egg/portkey hatching, where your location is sent to Niantic in order to calculate distance you have walked, however i hardly doubt they are storing it, as they have enough problems with other mechanics due to server capacity.

Not to mention things like GPS drift, and GPS spoofing - the raw location and movement data is mostly useless.
I do turn my spare phone into hotspot mode while at home in order to get more distance - i get about 10km/hour just because my GPS is inaccurate. Imagine how useful this is, if all hardcore players are doing that.

Isn't that necessary for the games to work?

[sabbede]

A location-dependent AR game like Pokemon Go will need to track the player's location in order to work, right?

Internet Connected Sensors

[johnsie]

Well, if you're walking around with a pocket full of Internet connected sensors, what exactly do would you expect. That data is worth money. However, in the grand scheme of thins, your data isn't really that important for anything other than targetted marketting.

Kotaku discovery: "Ice is really cold water!"

[Dagmar d'Surreal]

Let's not mince words. This whole story is about as insightful as Columbus was in "discovering" America. At least it was news to the people who lived way over in Europe, but for everyone who grew up there... *meh*

If, by chance, you somehow ignored the EULA telling you repeatedly that your location would be stored and tracked while you played the games, some common sense (and the fact that on the phone is a map featuring a marker indicating the players's location being updated in realtime) would let most p