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Comment by andybak | Hacker News Reader

Ex-Ingress player here (Pokemon Go precursor).

I could you tell some stories... There's several recorded deaths (the one I can recall without looking it up involved drowning trying to reach a lighthouse). Players play whilst driving regularly. Several local disagreements almost progressed to physical fights.

There's a global network of data-scrapers on both teams that log all player activity for strategic reasons. Or maybe "just because they can". That's timestamped location data for every interaction with the game. (as far as I know this isn't possible with Pokemon Go. Being aimed at kids it's much more locked down and safe-guarding aware)

On the plus side - many healthy friendships were formed and even a couple of long-term relationships. I still occasionally meet up with my old chums.

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Yes, I've experienced everything you've mentioned since the beta days of Ingress.

On a more positive note... after finally hiring data scientists and mobile device hackers, Niantic have been progressively banning Ingress accounts suspected of scraping and/or automating the gathering of resources and recharging of portals. The impact in my area, southern California, changed longstanding faction dominated territories into fragmented pockets that either faction can now control. Suspected "automated" supply chains are now broken and rule changes to Quantum capsules resulted in the slowing down of attacks and lowered volume/frequency of those beneficiaries.

How much of that fragmentation simply come from legit players stop playing Ingress? Over here the community notably shrank and people don't defend their home base anymore as strong (even in legit ways)

Gotta tell you, this whole thing reads as seriously creepy. Who's to say that intelligence orgs or other interested parties wouldn't create or piggyback on things like this for a source of high granularity location data? Even just to resell?

In the case of games where you use the camera, wouldn't someone maybe also want to use (at least snapshots of) the video feed? Like, on the benign side you could use it to update Google Street View, but on the more malicious side it's easy to imagine putting some rare Pokemon down somewhere and baiting someone off in order to get them to take pictures of specific things for you without needing an agent on the ground to go and do it.

I can't imagine running a game like this on my hardware or allowing my kids to do so. You've gotta be a bit naive to just assume it's completely innocent.

>Who's to say that intelligence orgs or other interested parties wouldn't create or piggyback on things like this for a source of high granularity location data?

How is this sort of location data useful? Sure, my day to day walking around is useful, but like parent said above, data is only recorded when you're actively playing the game. So you'd get a bunch of location data of... people going to the places the game wants them to go. You can't really do anything with that.

Yeah but a phone is also a device collecting tons of useful metadata - nearby towers,wifi routers, bt devices and even the most secured iPhones can be turned leaky with enough access.

Simply get into an iPhone of a known location based app gamer and then add a pokestop to a location. Even if the gamer gets picked up it won't be too suspicious since they'll have a history of going to lots of random locations. Even if the hack is detected by a suspicious organization, the phone will have transmitted the info out by the time they detect the hack.

This is just one poorly thought out scenario, there are lots of things you can do with phones nowadays - use them as collection tools, relays etc

Pokémon go has an option to track your location when the app is in the background, even though that location is almost never useful. This is actually a regression from a previous version, which synced with Apple’s health APIs to track steps without tracking location. It’s not hard to guess why they removed that feature.

It's pretty easy to do something with that info. Let's say there's a pokestop on a military installation, then most visitors are likely to be military personnel, and now we have a list of phones of military personnel. What's more, we can learn which troops are deployed to which bases, and patterns about how troops get redeployed to different bases.

How is this useful? Well, it's well known that Ft. Meade in the US is an NSA outpost. If troops from Ft. Meade regularly get transferred to Camp Pendleton (chosen arbitrarily), then we can infer that there's likely to be a lot of SIGINT (electronic spying) activity at Camp Pendelton. For a smaller installation (say a covert safe house abroad), these sorts of clues may be the first signs that foreign intelligence agencies can use to detect that these bases even exist.

ok.. and if one weren't military personnel? The original comment seemed to be raising some kind of unspecified fear about this in general, not just for a small segment of the population who frankly should know better.

Well, one could get unsuspecting users to take pictures around all kinds of facilities and such. Consider too that if you have multiple databases of this sort, you can draw a lot of inferences based on who is usually around whom.

You still haven’t provided a reason why this is a bad thing. Ok, so there are unsuspecting users taking photos of the local YMCA facilities. What you’re talking about is similar to the social graph but on a much smaller scale. The only reasonable use is for advertising. The world’s not going to end.

Foreign intelligence services are likely just as interested in hiring FAANG employees as they are soldiers. A compromised Googler could get them lots of access.

Head over here: https://outgress.com/

See the activity heat map about halfway down the front page? That is (or could be) a single person's play pattern. It is ludicrously easy to figure out where the average player works, if they play at work. It's often easy to figure out where they live. There are enough points of interest in any urban area so that game activity tracks where you typically go, not just where the game wants you to go.

And that site is using a fairly crude, incomplete method for scraping. It doesn't capture everything by any means.

I would imagine most players are recording data at all times - the game harasses you nearly nonstop, every time you launch, attempt to catch, randomly walking around to enable "adventure sync", which is "always location".

> How is this sort of location data useful?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...

> Sure, my day to day walking around is useful, but like parent said above, data is only recorded when you're actively playing the game. So you'd get a bunch of location data of... people going to the places the game wants them to go. You can't really do anything with that.

Of course you can. You can for instance see where people can't go because the area is restricted.

If I recall correctly, Strava had precisely this unintended consequence -- if you saw someone using the app to run laps in the middle of nowhere, it was likely a military base.

Yep.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...

Savvy criminals were also using Strava to nab high end bicycles.

> Gotta tell you, this whole thing reads as seriously creepy.

Yes. That was exactly my point.

> You've gotta be a bit naive to just assume it's completely innocent.

I certainly didn't assume anything of the sort.

As a fellow ex-Ingresser, I think there are some truly fascinating stories that will eventually be lost about all the effort that has gone into that game globally. I’ve seen heroic feats of software engineering, physical effort and project management, all in the name of some mobile game that’s a much bigger game of capture the flag.

I mean, almost any game that’s popular enough ends up having these kinds of crazy stories. If you think what Ingress players do is crazy, you should see what EVE Online players get up to...

Are we talking IRL interactions with EVE here, because the game certainly isn't.

Losing G+ really hurt here, since that was the primary community tool. I didn't save as much as I wanted to. Luckily there are some epic stories in Google Docs. Actually...

https://bit.ly/ingress-sitrep-homecoming-1

https://bit.ly/ingress-sitrep-homecoming-2

https://bit.ly/ingress-sitrep-homecoming-3

Ah, I do miss the community of Ingress. It's such a shame the game was ruined with Ingress Prime, which is a lesson in bad usability.

I don't miss the "cheating" griefers, though.

It's been so long since I played, obviously, I can't remember all the terminology. I had another green player destroy my base link (whatever it was called - my oldest link) because it was in his way. He could have reached out to me and I might have given him the okay. So I was real mature about it, I caused a scene in the world chat and rage-quit.

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