This is a bit of a questionable article. I gave a search for the quoted word “exploit”/ed from the title, and it didn’t have any hits in the article. So I’m not sure where it’s coming from.
The article doesn’t actually confirm that the data in Pokemon Go was used in military operations or for military technologies, but it does share the opinion of one person who believes it to be so.
But because this agrees with a bunch of people’s suspicions, people are accepting it at face value.
So now they know where children gather, they can avoid bombing them, right?
“Dronizard, use your kamikaze attack!” - Team Epstein member, Kegsbreath.
This is why we can’t have nice things
If you ever played Ingress, you’d know Pokemon Go is just a skin for it that Niantic applied 3 years later. Literally the same nodes you battle over were now just Pokemon gyms. All the user setup nodes, the proxy battles, landmark nodes, etc. now just Pokemon theme. Literally the same game, but got Pokemon skin.
So unless catching Pokemon as a side-game is what the military is just now grabbing onto, I find it hard to believe they just ignored Niantics’s Ingress structure and mapping for 16 years…
Over the years, players generated vast amounts of visual mapping data by scanning streets, buildings and public spaces to progress in the game.
Which I believe refers to AR Mapping . (Note it’s an archive.org link because this feature was removed from the game earlier this month.) I haven’t played Ingress in a few years, but I don’t think it had these tasks.
Basically you take a video of the area you are in, and that data could in turn be used to create a 3D representation of whatever you scanned. So instead of knowing you having a house at a given location, you know how tall it is. Google Maps actually has a feature called “Aerial View” where you can see something similar.
I think they released a new reskin of their product line last year in the guise of Monster Hunter which is also similar to Ingress and Go.
There is no way a mobile app could possibly capture the wonderful feeling of one of your teammates carting (yet again) after smashing a giant octopus for 45 minutes and you get jack shit.
The game was like a time vortex. Waiting took aged and the pokemon scent actractor or events felt over really fast
And the Harry Potter game.
I think the most difficult thing about navigating modern life for me is the impossibility of doing no harm to the world around you. PoGo is a children’s game to help you get out and exercise more, but if you play it, you’re complicit in modern genocide in Gaza or the destruction of Lebanon or whoever has decided to weaponize your favorite franchise from when you were six:
The players have indirectly, perhaps minimally but still effectively, contributed to military applications.
Saudi Arabia owns Pokemon Go
What? No Tik-Tok level shitfit from Trump?
I was called a conspiracy theorist for dropping the game the first time I heard they were selling data generated from users on the app in 2018.
I dropped it around the same time for the same reason. And yeah, got told I was overreacting and leaning too far into the woo-woo.
If you didn’t nuke your account, you may be able to sell some of the Pokemon, at least there used to be ways to do that.
Ah yes, let me give my bank account details to this company known for selling personally identifiable information to military contractors using it to commit crimes against humanity.
3rd party sale. Think sell account on craigslist.
@[email protected] didn’t make it sound like there was an official way.
The article suggests visual scans—presumably of Pokéstops and what not—could be used in drone navigation when GPS is jammed. Wouldn’t Street View be far more appropriate for that?
It gets outdated pretty quickly, and only covers where they can drive. Not to mention, if you can crowdsource it, you don’t have to do it at all.
Scans include more information than just pictures, as it’s tied with metrics of azimuth/yaw/pitch/roll/etc.
Never played Pokémon Go myself, partly because it felt weirdly invasive - and now I’m kinda glad to know I was somewhat justified
no shit?
huh…guess I have a bet to collect now.
Great. Now we can all shout, “….bUt HeRrrr StArTeR chOicE!!!”
