Congratulations, Pokémon GO Master! You Helped Create The Future of Surveillance
You thought you were just having fun, capturing Pokémon, battling over gym leadership, traipsing over sacred spaces such as cemeteries and private gardens... and you were! But while you were “catching them all” you were also unwittingly sending detailed images and location data to Niantic, creators of Pokémon GO. Professor Oak would be so proud!
With your un-opt-outable help, they created what’s known as a large geospatial model, the bedrock for the future of augmented reality experiences. It’s a real-life Pokedex… that other companies will clamor to pay lots of money for.
You’ve contributed to the next great leap in non-consensual cartography. But remember, as with all great discoveries, this data is not yours to keep. It belongs to progress, logistics, and perhaps even military efficacy. So, pat yourself on the back, Trainer! Thanks to your involuntary participation, no space will ever again escape the all-seeing eye of innovation.
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PRINTING JUST THE FACTS
- Niantic, the company that created Pokémon Go, secretly collected 10M user location scans. They’re now using them to build a Large Geospatial Model (LGM) to develop augmented reality (AR), robotics, and autonomous systems.
- Niantic claimed that over 1M of those location scans are “activated and available for use,” and that they’re receiving about 1M “fresh scans each week, each containing hundreds of discrete images.” Niantic doesn’t allow users to opt out of location tracking nor tell them what they use their data for internally.
- The LGM uses geolocated images collected from their games, enabling centimeter-level accuracy for features such as virtual item placement and spatial interaction.
- Niantic’s dataset, unlike Google Street View, focuses on pedestrian-accessible locations. However, Pokémon Go players’ exploration of public and private areas led to a 2018 lawsuit settlement over access to sensitive locations like private gardens, the Holocaust Museum, and an Alabama cemetery.
- While Niantic claims such data could be used for gaming, spatial planning, and logistics, critics argue that Pokémon Go players unwittingly gave their data for other uses, such as for military use.
Sources: Sports Illustrated, 404 Media, Niantic Labs, Dataconomy, BBC, and Forbes.
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