<story><title>How Canada&apos;s military reacted to seeing Pokemon Go players trespassing</title><url>https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/pokemon-canada-military-bases-1.5393774</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>parliament32</author><text>&amp;gt;Who&amp;#x27;s to say that intelligence orgs or other interested parties wouldn&amp;#x27;t create or piggyback on things like this for a source of high granularity location data?&lt;p&gt;How is this sort of location data useful? Sure, my day to day walking around is useful, but like parent said above, data is only recorded when you&amp;#x27;re actively playing the game. So you&amp;#x27;d get a bunch of location data of... people going to the places the game wants them to go. You can&amp;#x27;t really do anything with that.</text></item><item><author>core-questions</author><text>Gotta tell you, this whole thing reads as seriously creepy. Who&amp;#x27;s to say that intelligence orgs or other interested parties wouldn&amp;#x27;t create or piggyback on things like this for a source of high granularity location data? Even just to resell?&lt;p&gt;In the case of games where you use the camera, wouldn&amp;#x27;t someone maybe also want to use (at least snapshots of) the video feed? Like, on the benign side you could use it to update Google Street View, but on the more malicious side it&amp;#x27;s easy to imagine putting some rare Pokemon down somewhere and baiting someone off in order to get them to take pictures of specific things for you without needing an agent on the ground to go and do it.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t imagine running a game like this on my hardware or allowing my kids to do so. You&amp;#x27;ve gotta be a bit naive to just assume it&amp;#x27;s completely innocent.</text></item><item><author>andybak</author><text>Ex-Ingress player here (Pokemon Go precursor).&lt;p&gt;I could you tell some stories... There&amp;#x27;s several recorded deaths (the one I can recall without looking it up involved drowning trying to reach a lighthouse). Players play whilst driving regularly. Several local disagreements almost progressed to physical fights.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a global network of data-scrapers on both teams that log all player activity for strategic reasons. Or maybe &amp;quot;just because they can&amp;quot;. That&amp;#x27;s timestamped location data for every interaction with the game. (as far as I know this isn&amp;#x27;t possible with Pokemon Go. Being aimed at kids it&amp;#x27;s much more locked down and safe-guarding aware)&lt;p&gt;On the plus side - many healthy friendships were formed and even a couple of long-term relationships. I still occasionally meet up with my old chums.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>BryantD</author><text>Head over here: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;outgress.com&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;outgress.com&amp;#x2F;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;See the activity heat map about halfway down the front page? That is (or could be) a single person&amp;#x27;s play pattern. It is ludicrously easy to figure out where the average player works, if they play at work. It&amp;#x27;s often easy to figure out where they live. There are enough points of interest in any urban area so that game activity tracks where you typically go, not just where the game wants you to go.&lt;p&gt;And that site is using a fairly crude, incomplete method for scraping. It doesn&amp;#x27;t capture everything by any means.</text></comment>
<story><title>How Canada&apos;s military reacted to seeing Pokemon Go players trespassing</title><url>https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/pokemon-canada-military-bases-1.5393774</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>parliament32</author><text>&amp;gt;Who&amp;#x27;s to say that intelligence orgs or other interested parties wouldn&amp;#x27;t create or piggyback on things like this for a source of high granularity location data?&lt;p&gt;How is this sort of location data useful? Sure, my day to day walking around is useful, but like parent said above, data is only recorded when you&amp;#x27;re actively playing the game. So you&amp;#x27;d get a bunch of location data of... people going to the places the game wants them to go. You can&amp;#x27;t really do anything with that.</text></item><item><author>core-questions</author><text>Gotta tell you, this whole thing reads as seriously creepy. Who&amp;#x27;s to say that intelligence orgs or other interested parties wouldn&amp;#x27;t create or piggyback on things like this for a source of high granularity location data? Even just to resell?&lt;p&gt;In the case of games where you use the camera, wouldn&amp;#x27;t someone maybe also want to use (at least snapshots of) the video feed? Like, on the benign side you could use it to update Google Street View, but on the more malicious side it&amp;#x27;s easy to imagine putting some rare Pokemon down somewhere and baiting someone off in order to get them to take pictures of specific things for you without needing an agent on the ground to go and do it.&lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#x27;t imagine running a game like this on my hardware or allowing my kids to do so. You&amp;#x27;ve gotta be a bit naive to just assume it&amp;#x27;s completely innocent.</text></item><item><author>andybak</author><text>Ex-Ingress player here (Pokemon Go precursor).&lt;p&gt;I could you tell some stories... There&amp;#x27;s several recorded deaths (the one I can recall without looking it up involved drowning trying to reach a lighthouse). Players play whilst driving regularly. Several local disagreements almost progressed to physical fights.&lt;p&gt;There&amp;#x27;s a global network of data-scrapers on both teams that log all player activity for strategic reasons. Or maybe &amp;quot;just because they can&amp;quot;. That&amp;#x27;s timestamped location data for every interaction with the game. (as far as I know this isn&amp;#x27;t possible with Pokemon Go. Being aimed at kids it&amp;#x27;s much more locked down and safe-guarding aware)&lt;p&gt;On the plus side - many healthy friendships were formed and even a couple of long-term relationships. I still occasionally meet up with my old chums.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jackpirate</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s pretty easy to do something with that info.  Let&amp;#x27;s say there&amp;#x27;s a pokestop on a military installation, then most visitors are likely to be military personnel, and now we have a list of phones of military personnel.  What&amp;#x27;s more, we can learn which troops are deployed to which bases, and patterns about how troops get redeployed to different bases.&lt;p&gt;How is this useful?  Well, it&amp;#x27;s well known that Ft. Meade in the US is an NSA outpost.  If troops from Ft. Meade regularly get transferred to Camp Pendleton (chosen arbitrarily), then we can infer that there&amp;#x27;s likely to be a lot of SIGINT (electronic spying) activity at Camp Pendelton.  For a smaller installation (say a covert safe house abroad), these sorts of clues may be the first signs that foreign intelligence agencies can use to detect that these bases even exist.</text></comment>