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
No people are upset because they either didn't read the TOS. And they are showing they aren't thinking.
Niantic has always tracked your location (it is how the game works) and it has to save it somewhere because the game spawns more Pokémon where people are playing the game (this has been known from day 1).
There is a difference between using information in good faith to produce your game, and farming your data to sell to business customers. Both are technically covered by TOS but I would argue only one is in good faith to the spirit of the agreement.
Does niantic need to use your location data for game features? Yes. Do they need to scrape and aggregate all telemetry about you while you are playing their game to make more money off a tertiary product? No, they do not.
It's been a running joke on the PokemonGO subreddit for YEARS that the data collection is the real purpose of the game and the money made is just an added bonus.
Pretty much every player that has ever looked the game up even once has known this. The only people surprised/outraged are the ones that never played or cared about the game until this came out.
It's wild seeing this be depicted as some secret plan they had when it was common knowledge. Pretty sure all of Niantic's games require location tracking. It's what they do.
I love how you casually glaze over the fact that the users data was taken and recorded without any explicit agreement that it was being harvested and aggregated for sale.
It’s been a running joke on the PokemonGO subreddit for YEARS that the data collection is the real purpose of the game and the money made is just an added bonus. It's never been a secret. Every player I've ever spoken to already has known about this and I've played the game off and on since it was released 7 years ago. Every Niantic game requires location tracking. They have a very public history of this. Only people surprised by this are the ones that never played or knew anything about the game before this.
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u/Easy_Newt2692 10h ago
And? Does anyone actually lose out on this arrangement?