Monday, August 15, 2016

Pokemon Go -- Phoning Home?

What if Pokemon Go was sending all real time video captured by the phone camera to a cloud storage point?

Obviously it is not.  Data use would be too high.

But...But...what if it was.  What if it could in the future offering some inducement for the user to knowingly send video of their Pokemon pursuit?  It would in effect like putting a Google street view cam in the hands of everyone playing Pokemon and then fixing the place of Pokemon appearance to lead users to the geo point and record video.  Putting the character directly in front of the geo point of interest taking video.

Or, simply a few still frame pictures which is not much of a data use load.

If Pokemon Go is not phoning home video now them might it be phoning home snapshots of places that the creators/managers of the game want for some unknown reason?  How did those geographical point pictures get into the game in the first place?

Say that I want a snapshot of a particular place in the USA.  I simply introduce a Pokemon to that point and wait for someone to try and capture it.  Link it to every ball thrown to take a picture and send it.  What if that place was someplace that was rather restricted to the point of not being legally accessible? Who would be breaking the law if they did not take the picture but only got it from a player in an unauthorized place taking a picture of it as a function of playing the game.

The virtual Pokemon could simply be filtered out of the picture.

The possibilities are here....just takes imagination to extract value from them.

This thing is big.

I really don't know much about Pokemon yet.

This link talks about phoney Pokemon Go apps that steal info on the phone.
http://www.12news.com/news/local/hackers-use-pokemon-go-to-infect-your-phone/269874845
 That is one thing to beware of but...............

If the real game was hacked in a manner to send pictures or even bursts of video to a hacking source like the NSA of very specific geo locactions, indoors as well as outdoors then some valuable information could be captured.

My knowledge of Pokemon Go is sadly lacking.  Google is an involved player.
http://fortune.com/2016/07/12/google-pokemon-go/

This from the Naked Capitalism Watercooler 15 August 2016: http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/08/200pm-water-cooler-8152016.html
"The Bezzle: “The suddenly vast scale of Pokemon Go adoption is matched by the game’s aggressive use of personal information. Unlike, say, Twitter, Facebook, or Netflix, the app requires uninterrupted use of your location and camera — a ‘trove of sensitive user data,’ as one privacy watchdog put it in a concerned letter to federal regulators” [The Intercept]. “All the more alarming, then, that Pokemon Go is run by a man whose team literally drove one of the greatest privacy debacles of the internet era, in which Google vehicles, in the course of photographing neighborhoods for the Street View feature of the company’s online maps, secretly copied digital traffic from home networks, scooping up passwords, email messages, medical records, financial information, and audio and video files.” That’s not a bug…  "

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