While Pokémon GO users (there are millions and millions of them already) are collecting all 150 of the game’s fictional species of creatures, Niantic and Nintendo are gaining access to and collecting a lot of your personal information. It’s not just the ability to track your location, or the fact that the app is linked with your Google account that’s worrisome; most users accepted a level of invasive monitoring willingly, given the game is about GPS-based hunting.
But the app gives away way more than that to the company. Way more.http://www.thefederalistpapers.org/us/people-are-deleting-pokemon-go-asap-after-finding-out-disturbing-fact
Anyone who signed up for Pokémon GO with a Google account (the other option, a Pokémon.com account, is unavailable right now) has perhaps unknowingly given Nintendo and developer Niantic (formerly owned by Google, but still part of Google’s investment portfolio) full account access. That means they can see/edit/collect just about anything related to your Google account. Emails, photos, documents, all of your past location and search history: it can see all of this stuff, from even before you started using the app. It can also send emails as you—kind of the number one, red flag, alarm bell hacker opportunity in the digital world, aside from banking.
As it turns out, the big, bad Big Brother Spies of the NSA and the DHS and the CIA don’t really need their Patriot Act powers, after all. All the powers-that-shouldn’t-be need to do is create a fun, shiny trinket for the people to play with and they will literally pay for their own surveillance.
Welcome to the “Matrix Economy,” where people pay to spy on themselves…and have fun doing it!
Huxley would be proud.
https://www.corbettreport.com/the-cias-pokemon-go-app-is-doing-what-the-patriot-act-cant/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CorbettReportRSS+%28The+Corbett+Report%29
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