The most interesting part is that this game has not been flagged by the USA as an issue of foreign intelligence. I thought the placement of staff and personnel was supposed to be a much guarded secret.
It may be backwards. Niantic - the developer of the game, was founded by a guy who worked in "foreign affairs" for the US Govt [1]. One of his early companies was funded by In-Q-Tel, the CIA's venture capital branch [0].
Why put boots on the ground to get street level imagery, when you can just have kids all over the world do it for you?
[0] - https://www.networkworld.com/article/3099092/the-cia-nsa-and...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...
The "fitness tracking app Starva" did not reveal the secret army base, soldiers inappropriately using their phones and broadcasting their routines by using a civilian application designed to share their location revealed the secret army base.
I know it sounds pedantic, but I think we should be very careful about verbiage when it comes to who is to blame here: it's not the apps. This kind of thing gets exacerbated hugely by media headlines too - always putting the app front-and-center and downplaying the policy/training/OpSec failures. This leads to erroneous and scary conclusions like "apps should be flagged for national security" like the GP mentioned - but the actual takeaway should be that we need to train the dang soldiers operational security.
Wording matter.
It does.
"a person getting hit by a car" is quite neutral.
"a driver ramming their car into a person"."
This sounds intentional and shifts blame to the driver.
A good image breaking down a news article in this way: https://www.camcycle.org.uk/magazine/newsletter110/article8/
It says "the victim was struck" as if it was their fault being where they were, not "the driver struck the victim".
If you could create something to drawn them in, it would work better, but I'm not sure how the game works. Like attacking certain locations in Go to make them 'hard' to draw solders to an 'easy' IED'ed location.
The Taliban are just us, they like creativity, they'd think hacking Western Pokemon Go would be cool, it would help them recruit.
But, the logistics of getting for instance a McDonalds on a base also has risk. It's all risk management.
This isn't the Soviet-Afghan war, where the US was happily and openly supporting the same mujahedeen that eventually became the Taliban. Russia and China both have significant 'problematic' Muslim minorities, and have little taste for seriously sponsoring Islamic extremism.
(The US and Saudi Wahhabism, on the other hand, continue to be odd bedfellows, because, you know, we still can't get over Iran.)
Not the Taliban, but ISIS was very quick in adopting Google Earth/Google Maps early in their war in Syria, you could see some map screens in the videos where they used to prepare a targeted suicide bombing and such (not sure if those videos are on YT or Twitter anymore).
You could probably just make raw API calls. I'm pretty sure that's how all those pokemon-mapping websites worked for the first several months of the game's release before they removed those features from the game.
Something like Pokemon Go could permit dropping something rare to attract people to a sighted-in spot you'd then drop mortars on.
In any case, Pokemon Go's been out since, what, 2016? No one on any side has taken the American war in Afghanistan seriously since well before then. When you're just waiting around for Americans to acknowledge the inevitable and leave, there's not all that much point in finding clever ways to blow up Americans - all that's liable to do is make Americans maybe decide to stick around longer. That doesn't necessarily make Americans playing Pokemon Go in Bagram a good idea, but it also doesn't make it a bad one, and I can think of a lot worse.