Go / Niantic is in the news again. This time it is for robot food delivery.
How do you feel about being used as a training tool to provide continuous multi-seasonal data inputs into a global dataset for robotics, or more? They now can provide an offline rough estimate of the majority of all geo locations across all seasons to reduce data costs of operating robots thanks to you.
We pretty much consent to corporations getting our data. Use Rakuten? They know and sell all your shopping habits. Use Google maps? They know what routes people prefer to use
This was known a while ago but nonetheless its terrible for a company to monetize this data in a way that could be abusive for their userbase. It reminds me of when facebook had all those quizzes being shared (before they were all spam) that were just compiling the answers to make more and more derivative content (which was all worse) and used to datamine info.
Jokes on them though, they dont have reliable info from me when i have gotten only hacked mons in trades 
The rabbit hole unfortunately goes way deeper beyond Go. Quizzes were super early. Also remember all the early face filter apps or eventually filters on social media? It was all for capturing private device network metrics / data and for producing photographic training data.
Yep. And people are weirded out that i choose incovenience over convenience when it comes to using tech. 
This has been obvious and suspected since the start of Niantec with Ingress. I mean come on, the application was called INGRESS! And it sucked as a āgameā then, and sucked when they reskinned it with pokemon.
Anyhow, this is extremely old news, but I guess people need to be told about it still? And also this is a very whitewashed version of the story.
Here ya go:
If you give money to pokemon GO, you are paying for the privilege of being spied on and being an unwitting CIA asset. Unironically.
Itās become annoyingly difficult to get a decent dumb phone. My current Nokia 2660 has all these stupid hand-holding features for senile people (clearly the target demographic) and the buttons are unnecessarily huge.
We donāt get cool phones anymore, and the ones that arenāt just spy rectangles want you to install AARP mode.
Trying to get a dumb tv seems worse. Everything comes with its own interface, its own preloded junk, ads, etc.
TVās have been on a downward spiral since Pioneer perfected their plasma technology in 2007. Now it canāt deal with moving objects and asks you about your relationship status. And setting it up is almost as annoying as setting up a new laptop.
I accepted my fate the second I downloaded the game in 2016 and tapped āallow this app to access your location at all times.ā