Unwittingly? They paid you in-game currency to collect "research data". What did people think they were doing?
Niantic always announced itself as a data company.
Gonna end up having GPS telling me to drive into someone's backyard because Pokemon Go put a Charizard in there.
Um are we sure we want this data? Weren't there some people who walked into traffic and fell down hills playing Pokémon Go?
Tesla will buy them next week
Soon we’ll find delivery robots trying to pull some amazing stunts, all thanks to the sacrifices of some daring Pokemon Go players. Good times ahead 🍿
StUnt jUMP FaiLeD
Iirc a lot of people also taped their device to ceiling fans and stuff to get steps (to hatch eggs maybe? Idk I never played it)
So we’ll have it directing people into circles for hours!
It'll be interesting to see a Waymo or Tesla FSD follow the path of a few Pokémon Go spoofers through buildings or directly across a field.
Not sure how they'll manage the straight up teleportation I used to do. Live rural, definitely went to the beach 100km away daily lmao.
The modern day spoofing apps are really quite impressive. Teleportation or time travelling generally gets you an account strike fairly quickly, but some of the cleverer automatic walking functions are really quite cool.
I got sick of being careful and definitely got banned, but it wasn't hard to fake well as long as you are patient
Yeah, a bit of sense is all you need. I've not used spoofing tools but a few of my friends have - we live rural too and it revolutionises the game. Even our local small city centre isn't really raid friendly - it's not like you can hang a out Times Square and literally walk into a full raid whenever you like.
That said, the weekly Pokémon Club in rural areas is a great social, and mons tend to stay in gyms for more than twelve seconds making it a bit easier to get pokecoins. The game is still heavily skewed towards city centres though.
They've been collecting this data for over a decade and are just now starting to figure out what to do with it.
Nah, they've always been selling it as map data. And I still 100% believe the NSA is involved
Hah wouldn't that be something.
Tbh they don't need Niantic to do this. They can collect that info straight from phones. Back doors go brrrr (is that meme still relevant?)
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