
Niantic's apps collect a surprising amount of data about where users go - kaikai
https://kotaku.com/the-creators-of-pokemon-go-mapped-the-world-now-theyre-1838974714
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alasdair_
I worked at Niantic (originally on Pokemon Go) since the day they officially
spun out from Google until a few months ago.

I am speaking solely for myself when I say that, While the company has plenty
of flaws, it is very serious about privacy protections. It was drilled into
every engineer from day one that we were dealing with really sensitive data.
Not just any old data - kids were a target audience and so we were dealing
with realtime location data from children under 13.

Niantic took a lot of time and effort to ensure that this data was deleted,
obfuscated or has as much precision removed as possible, as quickly as
possible.

I don’t like how Niantic handled some things, but their stance on privacy was
never one of them.

(Again, this is my personal opinion. I definitely don’t speak for Niantic.)

~~~
khawkins
I was very active in the Ingress community around that time and while I
appreciate their efforts, I don't think they were very successful in this
regard. Using IITC (3rd party Ingress planning suite) we could track people's
paths pretty well, to the point where you could easily see how others ran
their routes and could intercept them if you wanted to say hi, or something
more nefarious. I know at least one woman in the community changed their
account because of a stalking problem.

I didn't totally mind the lack of location privacy since the game made it
pretty clear you could run into people if you really wanted, but I wouldn't
give them flying marks on the privacy issue. For Pokemon Go I'm sure they were
far more careful, but Ingress really felt like the Wild West.

~~~
yborg
IITC was explicitly a violation of the ToS and Niantic made efforts to foil it
and ban those identified as using it until player outrage made them give up.
The nature of the game also was antithetical to the notion of privacy since
you could predict player movements just on the basis of field layouts. Anyone
playing in an area also quickly learned the approximate locations of home and
work for other players solely on the basis of habitual game activity. I mean,
the whole point of the game was geolocation, it seems odd to me that anyone
would have some kind of problem with that for Ingress.

~~~
Vosporos
From what I can read you've never been stalked by a creep…

~~~
madeofpalk
I think the point of the comment is that by playing the game, you broadcast
pretty sensitive data. It would be like if you were constantly uploading
geotagged photos for everyone to see, and being surprised about people
learning your location.

I really hate that this sounds like 'victim blaming', but if a threat vector
for you is being stalked by a creep, and you don't want people to know where
you are, then maybe voluntarily constantly broadcasting your location to the
public isn't the best idea?

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asah
What if you innocently play the game and THEN get a stalker, who uses game
data to identify work, home, etc.

If anybody can get a stalker, then nobody is safe playing this game... ?

~~~
TeMPOraL
That's a matter for police then. Any thing involving location data and semi-
public information could land you a stalker.

Anything can happen to anyone. Whether to care about it at all, involve the
state or solve it solve it yourself depends on probabilities involved.

~~~
asah
So privacy doesn't matter? And the police are the right solution for all
invasions of your privacy? Do I get the local police involved if remote
attackers use personal information to drain my bank account?

"The police" (local?) are a solution for certain kinds of problems, but that's
it.

Consider restraining orders and all the victims these orders failed to
protect. Far more effective is a large dog or other adult humans.

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ggm
How is this a surprise? The original nitanic red-v-blue game was totally about
geo-location.

Interesting read but the hook of _surprising_ doesn't grab me. What amazes me
is that I can't find a page to do experimental A/B testing in these users for
$.

~~~
Fnoord
Because it is a paid-for app instead of a gratis one. People expect they "paid
off" the privacy invasion that way. Turns out, they did not.

~~~
kbenson
That's an interesting assumption of people, and I can see where they might
come to that, but the logic is unfortunately flawed. Just because
publishers/developers might feel the need to monetize user data on free apps
to make money, doesn't mean they won't also do it for paid apps to make _more_
money.

Betting a business is going to leave money on the table because it's the nice
thing to do is not a winning strategy on the consumers part.

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dx87
I guess it's suprising if you've never looked into it, but even back when
their only game was Ingress, it was a gamified way of giving them location
data that they can sell to help optimize mapping software.

I guess I had my first real wake-up call about how much data is being
collected and used was when I got an Android update, and google maps had pre-
filled entries for my home and work addresses based on where I spent most of
my time at certain parts of the day.

~~~
jumpingmice
Yes the entire purpose of Ingress was to make meat modules walk to under-
documented locations, take pictures, and indicate points of interest. The meat
modules seemed to think it was "fun". Hard to explain.

~~~
nirui
Was a player, but to this day I still can't figure out why "Go there, take
pictures, and 'capture' a location" can be THAT beneficial when it come to map
software optimization.

I know the game certainly records my location which maybe good for discovering
walk route, but other data they've collected seems (I guess) useless. How can
picture of sculptures improve map quality? Kind curious.

~~~
cheschire
A level 40 player (deeply committed to get that high) creates a stop with a
photo of a statue in his back yard fountain so he could cheat. You could wait
until multiple people submit it, or just allow it and just see how many people
visit it. Either way, you get validation data on it.

Conversely, a player creates a stop for a new statue that was just placed
outside of a government building in the last few weeks. This stop gets visited
hundreds or thousands of times a day. You've now identified a hub. This hub
can be used to validate the existence of other items of interest in the near
vicinity.

~~~
nirui
It makes more sense now, but I still got questions.

You see, when you created an in-game location, you're inviting players to go
there, regardless whether or not the location is popular in the real life.
Dedicated players may take a detour from their normal day-to-day route just to
hit that location to gain in-game advantages, which will generate data noise
if the map software wants to use players data to improve their product for
normal non-player users.

Also, let's don't forget products like Google Maps and Bing Maps are already
collecting users locations. And in addition to the location, it also knows
where the user was, where the user wants to go and how the user would go there
(Take bus, drive, walk etc). That, is high quality data (Better than a Niantic
game could provide) that generates profit directly.

All the reasons combine, I think I still have some doubts about that business
model.

~~~
PeterisP
A couple points here.

First, you get data about how pedestrians can reach all the truly popular
locations. If you also get extra data about how pedestrians can reach various
irrelevant locations, okay, that doesn't have value but that's not harmful;
what matters is that all kinds of niche landmarks that would be interesting to
tourists are somewhere in your data.

Second, people making a detour from their normal day-to-day route to reach
some location is the whole point - these are local people with knowledge of
how their city works; you don't want to measure how tourists usually get from
landmark A to landmark B; you'd want to see what shortcuts an optimizing local
would take when getting from landmark A to landmark B - which is different
than simply looking at random people walking habits with no intent to optimize
the route; the gamification provides an incentive to optimize routes and
allows you to harvest the knowledge of that optimization.

If someone tells google maps that they want to go from A to B, and google maps
tracks how they got there, then it doesn't harvest any information about the
best route because the user doesn't know it, they wanted a recommendation and
likely tried to follow it even if it's very suboptimal, so you'll just get a
reprocessed version of the data you already had (and gave to that user). On
the other hand the data from Niantic is useful so that Google maps can make a
_better_ recommendation.

Third issue is that the Niantic process also allows you to detect undesirable
routes. If Google maps directs a tourist from A to B through a shortcut that's
passable but unpleasant in some manner, then they'll take that route; and if
they send another one there, they'll also go there, because they don't know
better and the alternatives are (probably) not obvious. You'll only get a
signal of people not going there if it's _really_ bad e.g. impassable.

Niantic, however, can detect that most people who want to go from A to B
(because of game incentives) but who _know_ all the routes from A to B
(instead of asking for directions like the google maps usecase) are
intentionally taking a longer route for whatever reason - which is again
useful data for improving Google Maps recommendations.

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m463
An important point is that it doesn't just passively collect location data, it
actively moves players to locations.

~~~
draugadrotten
Yes, there have been instances where people have been trying to put portals
into fenced off locations such as army bases or shipping yards. Useful to
learn about what's there... and those pictures could be useful in conflicts
too.

[https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/comment/19749](https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/comment/19749)
[https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/3117/portals-
in-...](https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/3117/portals-in-military-
bases)
[https://www.reddit.com/r/Ingress/comments/alenbc/portal_in_r...](https://www.reddit.com/r/Ingress/comments/alenbc/portal_in_restricted_military_base/)

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pochamago
I really cannot imagine being surprised about this

~~~
ehnto
"Wow! That is surprising!"

I gave it a shot. How did I do? It isn't very surprising no, I think the
author just added that in to add a nefarious tone to the article.

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saagarjha
> “If you have mobile computing and services people are using while moving
> around in the world,” said Hanke in a 2016 talk to the Berkeley School of
> Business, “the question we asked ourselves was, ‘Could these services
> influence how people behave in the physical world? Could the products
> they’re using cause them to walk a different path, drive a different path,
> divert from the trajectory that they’re normally going to go on? If you
> could do that through information services that you’re offering to people,
> there’s tremendous opportunity for businesses that might want to change the
> behavior of people to get them to go places where they wouldn’t otherwise
> go.” He added: “We were also interested in being an advertising company.”

I think it's crystal clear where this is going. Why you would even bother
giving the excuse of "we accidentally added code to collect all this random
metadata about you, sorry about that" given this is beyond me.

~~~
lonelappde
In case you forgot, Hanke was already working for the biggest advertising
company in the world when he had that brilliant insight.

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berbec
An free-to-play mobile game that requires GPS location to work collects
location data. Also at 11, water determined to be wet.

~~~
ehsankia
Well not only that, but the whole game mechanic is that you have to get close
to specific points of interest in order to activate them. Obviously for the
game to work, they need to know you are at said point of interest...

It's like accusing the airline you used to knowing where you traveled to...

~~~
lonelappde
It's an observation, not an accusation.

And you missed the part where the airline makes most of it's money from
passengers paying to be moved around, whereas Niantic makes nearly $0 from
anything players give them money for.

~~~
alasdair_
>Niantic makes nearly $0 from anything players give them money for.

I am under NDA so all I can say is that publicly available data (sensortower
or appanie for example) says Niantic has received literally billions of
dollars from in-app purchases from players. This may or may not be correct but
the amount is likely not “nearly $0”

~~~
berbec
Never underestimate how much people will spend on fancy hats (See Fortnight &
Dota)

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cheschire
There's a pokemon stop in the center of the pentagon courtyard area. You can
pretty much only get there as a visitor or as someone related to the
government / military.

If you want to talk about a really easy way to create a tracking system for
senior military officials, just mark their young aides and you'll be able to
find them internationally.

~~~
lonelappde
The military has been wrestling for years with the problem of troops
broadcasting their movements to the world, intentionally and accidentally.

~~~
zentiggr
Centuries, indeed.

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0xADEADBEE
I don't mean to be glib but this is a surprise to who exactly? I only know
Niantic from Pokemon Go (which requires your GPS to be enabled, presumably)
and they're owned by a company whose entire business model is data collection
for targeted advertising. I'm not sure this is a particularly surprising
outcome for a 'free' game if I'm totally honest.

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throwaway66920
“Surprising”

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darkhorn
[https://www.networkworld.com/article/3099092/the-cia-nsa-
and...](https://www.networkworld.com/article/3099092/the-cia-nsa-and-pokmon-
go.html)

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mister_hn
this was pretty known, I'm astonished that just _now_ it was made "public"

