Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know you kids (anyone younger than 40, by now) have a good time with this. No sweat. No big deal. I have a few friends (who, I realize with dawning horror, are slightly older than 40) who kinda liked the card game, and I understand just enough of it to know it’s completely out of my wheelhouse. (Actually, I first learned of it when my first wife’s kid sister got into it back in '96, but she was like eleven at the time.) The mechanic doesn’t interest me, the art style repels me, the cuteness grosses me out. As I said, no big deal. I still like Destroy All Monsters and fully recognize that we all have a few indefensible tastes. 
All that said, this article right here still gives me the screamin’ heebie-jeebies, because even if every word in it is completely made-up, it’s still the kind of science fiction that is plausible enough to make every NSA middle-manager wish they’d thought of it first:
http://blackbag.gawker.com/pokemon-go-is-a-government-surveillance-psyop-conspirac-1783461240
Read it, and then tell me that chasing down that cute little Squirtle is still harmless fun at the park!
(Nah, don’t let me spoil your fun. Have a great time catching 'em all!)
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Figured it had to be something like this.
I play Ingress, and my primary privacy concerns revolve around the fact that other players can see a timestamped record of many of your game actions. So it’s a wealth of location data on display for social engineering someone’s routine, where they live and work. There are third party data scrapers out there for churning through the game’s intel feed (against Ingress TOS, but that’s not stopping them), along with other plug-ins for game-related planning. It certainly can be abused for harassment purposes.
I haven’t played P:GO yet, so I don’t know what all info gets seen by the rest of the player base. But you see who controls gyms and pokestops and when they get attacked, right? Plus we’ve already got one highly publicized criminal enterprise of muggers laying baited traps to accost players. This game’s way more popular than Ingress; we’re going to see more meatspace people issues.
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Well that sounds like a relief. If it’s erroneous, then they won’t have even written the software to touch any of that data in the first place (regardless of access permission level)?
I’d suggest that if you’re interested in a game where you explore your neighborhood and remotely hack ‘portals’ – basically the exploration parts of Pokemon GO without the monster-catching bits and a stripped-down hacker-tech art style – try Ingress, the game that preceded it. Lots of fun without the cutesy critters (which, personally, I like, but to each their own).
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But they enjoy being collected, and fighting for their owner’s glory.
Brilliant idea for a toy. I wish I’d been cynical enough to think of it first.
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War is Peace.
Freedom is Slavery.
Ignorance is Strength.
…Pokemon is Go!
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A little more in-depth exploration (I can’t remember if it’s linked in that retraction or not…) https://gist.github.com/arirubinstein/fd5453537436a8757266f908c3e41538
I was actually in Japan when the card game dropped* and remember my host brother sharing it with me. My impressions were that someone had the clever idea to localize Magic: The Gathering, simplifying it somewhat to drop the target age demographic. That last bit was pretty brilliant, IMHO, because it’s around, what, 3rd grade or so(?) that everyone gets into collecting something.
- for years I thought the card game preceded the video game, but nope. From a game design perspective, iterating in that direction is weirdly fascinating.
It’s optional. You don’t have to interact with anyone, you just can if you choose to go to a popular spot when everyone’s off work. You can also put some earbuds in and become effectively invisible. I went out in the morning with just the dog and didn’t see anyone at a bunch of stops. The game’s not for everyone, but it’s popular for a reason - it’s really fun.
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I love that he’s putting “Hugo Nominated Author” on there. He might as well milk that for all it’s worth (pun really truly not intended).[quote=“nemomen, post:29, topic:81288”]
There were like 50-80 nerds aged 20ish-50ish going to the spots, trading tips, and just having a nice time wandering around the park with their game.
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Apparently I missed out on a big gym battle at the park last night. It was Mystic! Then it was Valor! Then it was Mystic! And there were lures out at 4 of the stops. I should have gotten off my butt.
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This only applies to the iPhone. Although the Android version doesn’t do this,if it did, Android allows your to revoke individual permissions from an app.
There were lures out on five or six stops at the park last night. We caught a ton. Our park has about ten stops, there’s a little circuit you can take to keep cycling through, so we got a nice long walk out of it. Also there’s a dragonfly migration happening, so there were hundreds and hundreds of dragonflies flying through (I love seeing odonata). I’ve delayed joining a gym since everyone in the fam. wants to agree on which one to join so we can all be on the same side for gym battles, but getting everyone to agree isn’t easy since we’re each a total pain in our own way (we still haven’t agreed on a name for the new hedgehog either - we really should all agree on either Primrose or Perdita, but some people are not bending to my will).
My daughter’s at a flute camp at TX Tech. Apparently college campuses are awesome places to find a ton of stops with lures. She’s got like 3x more Pokemon than the rest of us now.
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Niantic used to be part of Google. Looks like they are using an undocumented auth mechanism reserved for Google properties.
Oops. Someone didn’t follow the API docs.
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My experience was to deny it contacts when it first ran but everything else like camera and location seemed fair given that was the point of the game.
I don’t see it in my connected accounts at all.
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I work near the Space Needle in downtown Seattle and let me tell you, that place is overflowing with stops, gyms, and Pokeymans. The Space Needle is a gym. The Pacific Science Center is a gym. And then there’s this, my very favorite Pokestop:
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They released a 1.0.1 iOS update today that fixes the full access bug (in theory), though apparently Google has to do some tweaking as well.
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We’ve got a lot of students at UWP that are really into Pokemon, I strongly suspect they’ll be into Pokemon Go as well. (I usually just politely nod and go back to reading or coding of whatever the heck it is I’m doing in the lab.) Although one student did make something rather interesting in the Maker Space class:
She had plenty of spares, so I scored one of the fox-like ones from her for one of my own sweeties. (Of course it’s still sitting here on my monitor stand …)
I know there are lures on our campus, and I don’t even play the game. One of my friends was on campus with their partner this past weekend for a wedding. The partner had to step away from the festivities to go capture a Pokemon.
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(my favorite movie!)
