Over the years, Pokémon Go players have generated vast amounts of visual mapping data.
  • saltesc@lemmy.worldEnglish
    32·
    20 days ago

    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…

    • digitalFatteh@lemmy.caEnglish
      11·
      20 days ago

      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.

      • a_non_monotonic_function@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        20 days ago

        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.

    • MimicJar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      19 days ago

      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.

  • otp@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    4·
    19 days ago

    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.