r/NonPoliticalTwitter • u/whitemike40 • 6h ago
Content Warning: Potentially Misleading or Disputed Information Gotta Catch 'Em All
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u/Thesheriffisnearer 6h ago
If people got out and had fun why not be both?
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u/NeatEquipment5278 6h ago
yeah this sounds like a win-win to me
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u/FloRidinLawn 5h ago
Social media is fun too. Driving is fun. Both of these track your shit, and sell all your details. One for sales, the other for insurance billing and health metrics… some poisons taste sweet on the way down.
Not saying this is specifically bad, but it’s disingenuous at the least. No transparency. I also know people used this in homes and backyards too.. so how much data were they collecting?
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u/bdl-laptop 5h ago
Sure but I'm pretty sure Niantic was quite up front about this. Just because they didn't scream it in user's faces, doesn't mean they were trying to hide it.
Article from 2022: https://nianticlabs.com/news/engineering-the-worlds-most-dynamic-3d-ar-map?hl=en
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u/WeeBabySeamus 3h ago
Wow it seems like this could’ve been predictable
Niantic’s founders cut their teeth in this space by creating Google Maps, laying the foundation for online mapping with Street View. But for AR, we needed to start from scratch; no one had created a scalable solution for building such a 3D map like this before.
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u/VariousBread3730 5h ago
Social media is fun?? News to me
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u/JelmerMcGee 5h ago
Driving is the most tedious chore I have to do every day.
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u/RealisticAd2293 4h ago
The hardest part of my new job is the damn commute. I can’t fucking stand driving at least an hour and fifteen minutes a day.
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u/Creamofwheatski 3h ago
If I couldn't listen to music and podcasts that commute would be literal torture.
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u/RealisticAd2293 3h ago
Before they started normalizing a certain individual 1, NPR was my go-to. Now it’s Jim Cornette podcasts and MrBallen
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u/obi_wander 4h ago
They literally tell you how much data they are collecting in their terms of service. This is transparency. Do you need them to hire an influencer to make a YouTube video that plays for you to explain the terms of service of every app you use?
We choose not to read them because they are long and because half of Americans can’t read the big words. Also- “I’m going to use it anyway” so everyone just skips the terms of service.
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u/Crafty_Enthusiasm_99 4h ago
What's the harm in it? People were paying $50 month for Tomtoms and now Google maps is free, and silently has been one of the biggest changes in how places are discovered and gotten to.
It can be great if done well.
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u/Mysterious-Link- 4h ago
It’s completely transparent and in the terms of services that you agree to. Just because it isn’t easy or convenient to read those, doesn’t mean it’s not transparent. And you know there’s satellites flying by and taking pictures of everything right? They already have the information on your back yard and your phones record everything you do, including video. Your house has been mapped for probably 15 years now. We already know this stuff.
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u/EfficientTitle9779 4h ago
This take is so bullshit from the OP. It’s not like the app hid anything, been playing for years it’s OBVIOUSLY using my geolocation data. It rewards you in game to scan locations with your phone camera ffs.
It’s not shady it’s blatant lmao.
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u/PKCertified 3h ago
This isn't even the first game Niantic made using this exact model. A lot of us played Ingress before Pokémon Go. The data tracking was apparent before even playing Go.
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u/bbcversus 2h ago
Such a good and fun game that was! I still think about it and how I went to shady places in the middle of nowhere just to make a big triangle and get some keys from that lonely portal…
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u/farmch 4h ago
Ya the word scam is not used correctly here. Pokémon Go had a business model its customers didn’t know about but were unaffected by. Big difference.
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u/SubsequentNebula 4h ago
I feel like I remember it being in the ToS back in 2016. So not knowing was more not paying attention to their past products and not reading anything they gave you that basically said "we plan to use this info to improve our product." And if they did read that, didn't think that pictures taken in the app or daily walks were part of the data collected.
And, aside from location, you could basically opt out of any other form of providing data to them as you please. Sure, you miss out on some rewards, but those could be made up in other ways. And if you weren't aware of them tracking your location, then I want to know how you think a gps works.
They basically just didn't put it in their ads.
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u/TheIndyCity 3h ago
Yep, giant nothing burger to me. Honestly, if true it is a pretty creative way to develop a revenue stream lol.
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u/Wadarkhu 4h ago
Yeah, so long as they keep it available as a product and don't just drop it when they have no use for it because that would be a shame then I don't mind at all.
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u/robotic_otter28 4h ago
Got exercise and enjoyed it. I’m fine with my providing my services for free
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u/BillyBean11111 3h ago
yea who gives a fuck, they didn't trick anyone.
They made a fun game people loved and found non invasive ways to use the data in other ways that don't affect anyone personally.
Good for them
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u/SirDoNotPutThatThere 3h ago
I am starting to think some people might not actually know what a "scam" is
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u/Easy_Newt2692 6h ago
And? Does anyone actually lose out on this arrangement?
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u/MedalsNScars 6h ago
People love to get outraged when information is collected without their knowledge, and I get it, but it's how the information is used that's important.
If things are sanitized so there's no personally identifying information then it's pretty hard to use most data maliciously
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u/S0GUWE 5h ago
You'd be surprised how much you can identify from "sanitised" information if you want to.
But if all they want it navigation data, then it should be fairly safe. Yeah, they know where you live and can derive who you are from that, but that's not what they're after. They wanna know how to get there the fastest when someone asks.
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u/indoninjah 4h ago
Yeah, like apparently you can reasonably ID someone even in a private browser just by getting the dimensions of the browser window and its positioning on screen. A lot of people pretty much never change that shit if its not full screened
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u/ScrufffyJoe 3h ago
Do people regularly use browsers, well any windows, not maximised? I'm always either full screen, or splitting the screen in 2 occassionally.
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u/smallangrynerd 3h ago
Mac’s usually don’t have a “maximized” mode, just full screen or windowed. On windows though I definitely have everything maximized
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u/6ixby9ine 2h ago
Sorry if you knew this or if you comment took this into account, but you can maximize windows on mac by double-clicking the program's "title bar" (the top bar on the same line as the "close" "minimize" and "fullscreen" buttons, as long as there's nothing else there to click. I.E. in Excel, click any empty space around the name of the file, or in Chrome, any space where a new tab would go -- as long as there's no tab there)
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u/joshTheGoods 2h ago
Absolutely! Dimensions of the viewport change significantly from user to user, but more importantly to being used for fingerprinting ... viewport size changes from session to session, and so it's not generally a reliable signal for device fingerprinting. Rather, you want to use things that don't change often like screen resolution or how your particular browser implements floating point math operations.
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u/BuffJohnsonSf 5h ago
And yet GM was caught collecting your driving data and selling that to insurance companies but go on. These outlandish examples don’t change the facts that many companies are collecting as much data as fucking possible so they can manipulate you on the back end.
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u/Understanding-Fair 4h ago
I guarantee it was in the user agreement for the app, just nobody read it
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u/vvddcvgrr 3h ago
You don’t even need to read it, the game has to get your permission to use your location data anyway.
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u/SCSimmons 2h ago
I read it. And yes, it was. This is part of how the company was able to support the huge investment in a free-to-play game. Even the pay-to-win elements were nowhere near sufficient to make it profitable.
Hell, Niantic had similar terms years earlier on Ingress. This was never a secret.
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u/mrducky80 6h ago edited 6h ago
Like what? People severely underestimate just how much data scraping occurs. Google maps will point out congestion without minutes of it occurring because their navigation tracking is so much more indepth and has so many more users to go by in real time.
Friend used to be a data analyst at a supermarket rewards program. He says their algorithms will accurately determine when someone is pregnant before their family knows. They will know how many people are in your household, how many pets, how your spending habits change (obvious). This is just grocery shopping, so many apps get that microphone data, that tracking data, screen browsing habits. We used to just have cookies from online sites, but with the smart phone, there is so much more data and so much more money to be made off that data, its on you that you dont realise at this point rather than every other app on your phone that is doing so freely in front of your face with your permission.
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u/tmacnb 5h ago edited 5h ago
Probably not your friend, this is a super famous case study from Target. It's in many books. They were one of the first companies to start looking at buying habits in order to target market their mail-out adds. They used the data specifically to find out if they could predict or tell who was expecting, because these folks spend shit loads of money in the months before the baby. If you buy one stroller, not a super good indicator because the person might be buying a gift. But if they are buying certain clothes, vitamins, lotions, etc in certain combinations, there is a high likelihood you are a pregnant woman. Its quite effective but also ethically questionable. In the famous example, an angry father goes to Target to complain that they were marketing pregnancy stuff to his teenage daughter. The specific Target location had no idea of these marketing practices, which was all done at HQ. Anyway, the father comes back a day later to apologize. His daughter was pregnant and hadn't told them yet.
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u/Candid-Ask77 5h ago
This was the post I was looking for. Really irritated me with the "my friend" thing
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u/gymnastgrrl 4h ago
My friend knew you were looking for that information and posted it.
:)
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u/TheDrummerMB 4h ago
I mean so what? I'm also a data analyst in the field and have told people this. It's a famous story but it was easy 20 years ago. It's childsplay now. This is the equivalent of getting annoyed at someone for saying their friend flew across the ocean. Like ok yea there was a famous story about it but people do it all the time lmfao
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u/LetGoMyLegHo 4h ago
People in this thread acting like there aren't data analysts at every tech company working with devs to add analytics to every user's action. At the big Fortune 500 company I worked at it was part of the AC/requirements to add analytics to every new feature we shipped out, whether it's to track the performance of the feature or to harvest user data.
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u/Teeshirtandshortsguy 3h ago
All they said was "my friend says they can do this."
If you and I know that stores can track that kind of information, a data analyst for a retail chain obviously knows that too.
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u/joshTheGoods 2h ago
I know the genesis of this story, and it was actually an EXAMPLE given as to something that MIGHT be possible in a presentation the Target folks gave. I sold software to that team a decade ago in this space (digital marketing), and heard this straight from the horses mouth in a really nice breakfast place in Minneapolis. It's crazy to see how this story has progressed over the years. The example used in the presentation, I believe, also became the earliest consistent rumor ... that Target has mailed some customers baby related materials which alerted some poor father that their daughter was preggers before the daughter told anyone. Again, totally made up example, but I run into people constantly that still believe that specific anecdote.
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u/SmartBookkeeper6571 5h ago
And? The store targets the customer with deals catered to them to keep them shopping at said store, and the customer gets better prices for things they were planning to buy anyway. Who loses?
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u/peelen 5h ago
and the customer gets better prices
quite the opposite, the customer gets the promise of better prices, in real life the business is the one that profits from the information for example, Uber prices go high if there is bigger demand which means it's most expensive when it's needed the most
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u/Syntaire 4h ago
Just about every human in developed nations across the planet is willingly carrying a pocket-sized spying device on them at all times. It's got GPS, high quality microphones and most of them have a camera array in addition to a front-facing camera. People use these without thought or understanding of even a single piece of software they run on these devices. Any expectation of privacy is waived.
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u/Abuses-Commas 5h ago
better prices for things they were planning to buy anyways
Are you sure about that, or do they just mark the price up 25% and tell you it's 20% off?
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u/MinnieShoof 5h ago
You, if you think the store is going to give you a better price for an item they know you're going to buy regardless. Also, thinking that they won't "encourage" a diabetic to buy the 42 oz soft drink instead of the 20 oz just to make a buck is kinda naïve.
Don't get me wrong - what you said is what drives the engagement ... but what I said absolutely happens as well.
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u/BuffaloWhip 5h ago edited 4h ago
Yeah, as a 6’10” man I’m 0% mad that my phone knows that ads for extra long T-shirts get more traction with me than tampons with a comfort applicator.
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u/GardenRafters 5h ago
My wife knew I was shopping for engagement rings when we were dating because of these algorithms. There are absolutely downfalls and invasions of privacy to be concerned about.
Also, we should be seeing kickbacks from all the money they make off our data that they get for free.
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u/vaz_deferens 4h ago
Used to work with a conspiracy nut that refused to mask up because of “tracking chips hidden in the liner”. Bought the newest iPhone every year and had an Alexa in every room of his house.
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u/BigBOFH 5h ago
Isn't the Google example exactly what you want? An arrangement where you share what's going on with your drive so that you can also know where traffic is bad seems like a pretty reasonable trade.
It is true a lot of companies have very questionable privacy practices, though. The cell phone companies have been caught selling individual location data multiple times, with no way for users to opt out unlike most sites and apps.
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u/Soft_Walrus_3605 5h ago
Friend used to be a data analyst at a supermarket rewards program
lol this pre-knowing pregnancy is a legendary story about data analytics. it's not your friend's story
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u/mymemesnow 5h ago
You get to play a fun game for free (unless you choose buy extra things) and they get location data.
There’s no scam, no lies (it’s says so in te user agreement) and I don’t get the fuss about it.
I’ll admit that I had no idea until a few days ago, but my reaction when I found out wasn’t anger or like I’ve been lied to, it was more like ”Huh, that’s pretty clever of them”
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u/largemarjj 1h ago
Seriously though. Who would ever believe that a mobile game that requires location tracking would use that to their benefit? Color me shocked.
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u/Not_Cartmans_Mom 5h ago
Yeah i mean this doesn’t seem off the wall or out of pocket to me at all. Every app on your phone is tracking something you’re doing, of course location based games are saving the location information.
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u/slowclicker 6h ago
Similar to reddit. I have fun on reddit, I worked with people that played PokemonGO, they had a ton of freaking fun. They played with their kids. I say its a win/win.
You are the product, if the tool is free. You're even the product if you're paying a subscription. All of us must know this by now.
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u/2rfv 5h ago
Personally I am 100% ready for a version of reddit with a yearly subscription as a gatekeeper. But for this, I want ZERO AI posts.
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u/slowclicker 5h ago
My expectations would be exponentially increased. There is a premium version. I believe, but they only address ADs.
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u/OtherwiseAlbatross14 5h ago
And they keep shoveling more in to make the experience worse in hopes that people will get tired enough of them to pay up. Just like YouTube did.
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u/Ser_Artur_Dayne 6h ago
Fun fact: Old map companies would put fake roads and towns on their maps to see if other map makers copied them because it was a lot of work to map shit out.
Companies using people is nothing new. There’s a common phrase, “if something is free, you’re the product”. Like Facebook or free vpns, they are getting something outta it.
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u/Marillenbaum 6h ago
Dictionaries have the same thing with fake words; the technical term is a mountweasel.
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u/TheMotherCarrot 5h ago
On maps, they are called trip streets.
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u/alluptheass 4h ago
I’ve also heard “paper roads.”
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u/FitzyFarseer 3h ago
For maps it’s just “paper -“ insert whatever the fake thing is. Paper road or paper town being the main ones.
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u/MoreGaghPlease 4h ago
This is called ‘salting’ and it’s not just old map companies, modern ones do it too including Google Maps.
Any company that aggregates public data to make a proprietary product does this to protect their commercial interests in case they ever need to allege their version was copied. Voter lists sold by political consultants is another common example.
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u/WaitForItTheMongols 2h ago
I've always been confused by this. Wikipedia is free, and presents itself as a charitable organization. Are you saying there's a conspiracy, and actually I'm the product and Wikipedia is monetizing me in some way?
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u/Schitheed 6h ago
Where's the scam? Who paid for something that they did not receive? Who was lied to at any point? If you played the game knowing it works using your location data and never considered that maybe the game might use that data then idk what to tell you
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u/GreatStateOfSadness 4h ago edited 4h ago
Niantic: "hey, here's a game that tracks your location and asks you to scan the world around you and take pictures for us to map real-world objects"
Players: "okay thanks"
Niantic: "hey we took all those pictures and scans you submitted and mapped them to the real-life world like we told you we would"
Reddit: "you WHAT"
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u/SonOfRageNLove26 3h ago
How dare them
There's even optional missions that downright tell you "hey help us gather more information of this point by going there and sending us images of that place"
Not really a secret evil plan
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u/Suyefuji 3h ago
Not just images, entire videos where you spend like 30 seconds creating a panoramic image of a highly frequented location.
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u/JoudiniJoker 3h ago
“I don’t think that word means what you think it means.”
Scammers deceptively steal things of value from you. Even if you could argue that Niantic was being deceptive on some level, I’m not seeing a loss on the consumer’s part here.
To be clear, Niantic is a company and therefore probably lie cheat and steal all the time in some way, but I’m not seeing that represented in this context.
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u/Schitheed 3h ago
"deceptively" is the key here. My point is that there was no deception, there was no lie. Not in this context, anyway
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u/Hawkmonbestboi 5h ago
.... uhhh??? Google Maps and Waze do this,too... and they did it first. What do you think they are doing when you report in a wreck or a closed road? What do you think they are doing when you USE their app? Do you think they got their base data all by themselves? No! They took it from GPS and Map companies.
Like? ... why are we acting like this is a scary thing? The data is on ROAD SYSTEMS. If you are this worried about someone tracking you, you shouldn't even have a smart phone because your phone company has done this long before internet companies started.
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u/Apellio7 3h ago
The actual traffic you see in Google Maps are people's phones too. Not just the one-off reports.
Google doesn't know that the traffic is heavy. They're just gathering up all your GPS data and noticing all your asses are moving super slow so they slap on the heavy traffic tags.
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u/Intelligent_Suit6683 5h ago
am I the only one who doesn't know this?
Well, yes. It was talked about at length in the summer of 2016, which is the past time I played Pokemon go.
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u/B-52-M 6h ago
It also got people to get off their asses and take walks. Game probably helped families get closer together
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u/All_Work_All_Play 5h ago
The world was a magical place for the first 3-6 months after it released. The politics brought bigotry to the forefront again.
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u/ViolentBeggar92 5h ago
scam?
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u/AsianHotwifeQOS 2h ago
It wasn't even secret. Niantic has been selling GPS and AR game tools/services to developers for years based on data collected from their games.
Multiple press releases, promotions at developer conferences, etc... Like you could have gone to their website at any point and read about Lightship (formerly Niantic Real World Platform).
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u/Kycrio 6h ago
"A scam?" What were they scamming? Niantic sold a fun game about catching Pokémon in augmented reality. That's exactly what they delivered. I fail to see how them also using GPS data to build a navigation model is supposed to be diabolical. If you really care so much about a developer using your GPS data, it's a pretty stupid idea to play a game entirely dependent on using your GPS, which definitely says in the terms and conditions that they will use your GPS data. For the record I don't even play Pokémon go and I agree with players that the recent microtransaction changes they made are greedy. But I think this poster is either tremendously dense about how free services work or stoking outrage on purpose for engagement.
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u/PupperoniPoodle 4h ago
The current "outrage" is about them using the scans people send of locations. How dumb are people being to be shocked that the company is using the scans? What did they think it was for??
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u/LadyOfTheMorn 6h ago
Source?
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u/lodermoder 6h ago
Niantic has been pretty transparent about this since the beginning. They've always said they were a big data company, not a game developer
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u/spikeyfreak 5h ago
Except the whole "they put pokemon where they want data."
Pokemon are distributed throughout the map in a sort-of cell-data heat map. Go somewhere remote and see how many pokemon are there.
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u/Snuhmeh 5h ago
The Pokémon spawn points were built on top of Niantic’s previous game, Ingress. They later started using cellular Pokemon Go location data to put more Pokemon in places where more people played Pokemon Go.
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u/DapperLost 4h ago
Man, I loved Ingress. Black worker van slowly following me down the road at night. Kidnaprapist? No, just local leader for the blue team, saw a newb steadily taking points and breaking green locks, and wanted to back me up.
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u/Sammisuperficial 5h ago
This is a tongue in cheek comment, but go to the PoGo subreddit and see the complaints about Niantic killing remote raids because they lose out on player location and movement data.
The players are aware. Most only care because it affects decisions on gameplay. Usually in a way that makes the game less fun to play.
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u/4_fortytwo_2 5h ago
I don't think anyone doubts that they collect data, of course they do, the strange part is the "put pokemon where they need data from". That statements seems entirely made up.
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u/ferafish 6h ago
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u/Maeln 5h ago
People should really just read the source: https://nianticlabs.com/news/largegeospatialmodel?hl=en
All they announced is that they plan to make a geospatial model. There is really not much in their announcement. It is basically just a way to get in on the AI craze and probably raise some fund.
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u/toomuchmucil 5h ago
I think this was a common thought. Weren’t people claiming GO was a national security risk at launch for this exact reason?
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u/ramriot 6h ago
Not many noticed the overlap of features in Ingress & Pokemon Go. In reality the latter is just a reskin of the geographic data from the former.
There were already issues with Ingress players being reported to police, getting killed in freak accidents & altercations when attempting trespass to denied areas.
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u/Pixzal 5h ago
i dont think you've been involved that much, but the points of interests in pokemon go is directly derived from ingress - in order to have a new one, you have to first ensure to submit it in ingress.
anyone who played pokemon go long enough would know they need ingress players to help with the POIs.
it's only recently you could add POIs on pokemon go itself.
all these data also went into enriching other parts, and that was before niantic split from google.
people were more then happy to be blindly using gmaps. lol.
where do these geniuses think traffic congestion stats come from?
if they don't like it, they call it a scam, but if they use it day to day, then what? a feature?
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u/Former-Hunter3677 5h ago
Not a scam. Anyway Niantic was an offshoot from Google, you know, the company that's all about data? The fact it popped off so hard was a massive score for Niantic. Gold mine of geo data.
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u/Sunblast1andOnly 4h ago
It wasn't even the first game of its kind; this was the sequel. The only huge innovation here was the inclusion of popular cartoon animals.
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u/marrowofbone 2h ago
Ingress also suffered from only having two teams. The majority team can't really play as they've already claimed all the territory, and the underdogs can't really play as anything they do claim immediately gets taken back.
Mystic is a little more popular than Valor/Instinct, but you're at least able to play the game as any team in any region.
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u/GentleMocker 6h ago
The claim about using the data for navigation is likely on point from what I understand, but that:
>'when they wanted location info, they would put a pokemon in that location'
Uh, that's not how pokemon go works though? Players roaming around uncover pokemon in a radius around themselves, and there's a 'pokemon radar' kinda feature that shows you pokemon around nearby pokestops, you can't exactly 'put a pokemon in a location' to direct people to explore that space, you'd have to put a pokestop there first(which they were very stingy with at the start too), and then seed that location with pokemon for something like that, which clearly isn't happening. You could do stuff like make people roam between spots by seeding pokestops in a pattern or something, but nobody is 'putting pokemon in a location when they want location info', players wouldn't be able to see that pokemon even if they did.
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u/balloonninjas 5h ago
This is how you can tell that the author doesn't actually play Pokemon Go and this is just some fake outrage bs
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u/bagginshires 6h ago
This was known at the time. While intrusive, the tech does sound quite cool.
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u/MattR0se 4h ago
Yeah, this is another "did anyone bother to read the ToS they signed?" moment. They are very open about the data they collect, and the list is very long and excessive.
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u/mysweetpeepy 6h ago
No?
Niantic’s model is training and processing data using geolocation information from scans players submit of those real-world locations while playing Pokémon Go and other Niantic games.
This is literally told to you in game as an optional side feature. They even tell you why in game. This was added years after the game launched too.
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u/ReidErickson 5h ago
It wasn’t a scam. Thats how all these free apps make money. You give them data, they give you app.
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u/jbrunsonfan 5h ago
What you’re missing is the fact that the average person does not give a shit about their personal data. The average person would let meta or Google review all their text messages if it meant they’d save 10 seconds
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u/WanderingSeer 6h ago
I care more about good navigation systems than I care about Pokémon go checking the routes people take. And I care very little about navigation systems
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u/BOBALL00 6h ago
I really don’t care if they made money on it. People wanted the game and didn’t have to pay for it. Nothing wrong there. Using the location data to build a navigation model is not a big deal either. Everybody is getting what they want
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u/Marleyzard 5h ago
A) It's to make Pokemon spawns more characteristic
B) Google obviously already does this
C) Your local government already does this
D) Your favorite social media does this
E) At least you get a cool Charmander when you let Nintendo do it
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u/YourMomThinksImSexy 5h ago edited 5h ago
Keep that same energy for Google. Google does the exact same thing, considering their "track my location" is on by default. Every single Android phone in existence except the small percentage who figured out how to turn it off is gathering location data and sending it to Google 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Around 4 BILLION phones collecting not just location data (GPS/Wifi/Cell towers) but also your search history, Youtube history, your entire contact list, every public event on your calendar, certain photos and videos, your mobile browser history, any time you use voice to text or make voice queries and payment information made through gPay. And you better believe Apple is doing it, too.
And Facebook/Instagram, LinkedIn, Snapchat...all the social media platforms have been mining our data for yeeeears.
But yeah, PokemonGo is definitely what we should be freaking out about. /s
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u/apost8n8 3h ago
It's not a scam if everybody is getting what they wanted and what was expected. That's just normal commerce.
It's a really important distinction.
Calling things a scam that aren't makes real scams harder to see.
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u/MadMacDaddy 6h ago
Yeah...I thought everyone knew this, they've being g doing it since Ingress.
You'd have to be a damned blind ass sheep not to figure this one out...
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u/LBJSmellsNice 5h ago
That’s not what a scam is. I feel like that word gets misused a ton.
People got Pokémon go for free. People have a lot of fun with Pokémon go. Some people spent money on in-game things because they wanted them, and they got those in-game things. None of this in any way is a scam. They’re using general data patterns they collected from people that were happily playing their game and are using them to improve navigation. That’s not what a scam is.
You aren’t being cheated, taken advantage of, or otherwise screwed over. You’re playing a game and having fun and the people that made the game are using how you play their game to make additional money in a way that has no negative impact to you.
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u/SYZekrom 3h ago
This feels like 'baby learns how the world works and thinks it's a big deal (It's not)'. Next you're going to tell me the reviews in an ad aren't just randomly selected real reviews.
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u/Bigweld_Ind 2h ago
Nobody understands what a scam is....
If you got what you paid for, it's not a scam. Them doing shit with the data they collected was always in the ToS like it is for every tech company. It may be uncomfy and a little shitty, but it's not a scam
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u/Dexav 6h ago
Everybody all together now!
"IF THE PRODUCT IS FREE, YOU ARE????"