Pokémon has been at the center of so many heated controversies that Bulbapedia, a fan-curated wiki, keeps a running tab. The long list notes changes made to several generations of the games, including words altered or casino ("Game Corner") areas removed in order to ensure compliance with regulatory standards or to evade accusations of glorifying gambling—but it also notes the game's brushes with religious complaints, perceived Nazi symbolism, animal cruelty, and plenty of other issues.Pokémon came on the scene in the middle of a spate of panics involving violent crime and youth delinquency, but a few years before the focus on mass shooters or terrorism.
"A condition, episode, person or group of persons emerges to become defined as a threat to societal values and interests; its nature is presented in a stylized and stereotypical fashion by the mass media; the moral barricades are manned by editors, bishops, politicians and other right-thinking people; socially accredited experts pronounce their diagnoses and solutions; ways of coping are evolved or (more often) resorted to; the condition then disappears, submerges or deteriorates and becomes more visible… Sometimes the panic passes over and is forgotten, except in folklore and collective memory; at other times it has more serious and long-lasting repercussions and might produce such changes as those in legal and social policy or even in the way the society conceives itself."
For a minute, Pokémon Go became the scapegoat for every concern, real or imagined, people have with free apps, information security, and the alliance between corporations and the surveillance state.
The piece now displays an update containing a statement from Niantic that they "fixed Google account scope" for iOS users, and that it was an error. Security engineer Ari Rubinstein clarified how the app generates a token that could, in theory, be used to access user information in a writeup on Github. He summed it up for me even more succinctly, stating, "The token in question technically had access at one point to connect to some of the Google users' information, but not in the programmatic way that many journalists had theorized. This is now fixed, and the fix was shipped out incredibly quickly.""According to the Pokémon Go privacy policy, Niantic may collect — among other things — your email address, IP address, the web page you were using before logging into Pokémon Go, your username, and your location. And if you use your Google account for sign-in and use an iOS device, unless you specifically revoke it, Niantic has access to your entire Google account. That means Niantic could have read and write access to your email, Google Drive docs, and more. (It also means that if the Niantic servers are hacked, whoever hacked the servers would potentially have access to your entire Google account. And you can bet the game's extreme popularity has made it a target for hackers. Given the number of children playing the game, that's a scary thought.)"
The dizzying laundry list of intrusions into civilian privacy by both the state and corporations is almost enough to make you want to pull your molars out so Eric from the NSA can't hear your dreams anymore. But what about every other third-party app that mines your data to sell to advertisers, or has vague standards for information it's willing to share with police about you? It's all so much bigger and more pervasive than Pokémon Go, but perhaps the app has a role to play in our understanding of the vastness of the problem, and our desire to control it."So many apps are already collecting this data— Pokémon Go is just the latest. Google Maps keeps amazingly detailed history of your movements, for one example," says security engineer Leigh Honeywell. Like Rubinstein, Honeywell is less concerned about people reading our emails, and more concerned with the sheer volume of authorizations that people grant to apps on a daily basis—something she refers to as "privacy fatigue.""That's why it's so important for developers to be responsible in what they request—the average user is probably going to click "yes," and now the developer is responsible for being good custodian of whatever data the user has granted them permissions to," she says.Both engineers agree that Niantic—and software developers in general—need to be more careful with how they request and handle user information, as well as more transparent. But whether Niantic is reading people's emails or, as would be more likely the case, handing over metadata about users to law enforcement and government agencies, needs to be put in perspective. "I wouldn't worry about the government here, specifically in the case of Pokémon Go. They have this data en-masse anyways due to certain operations that have been published already," says Rubinstein. Edward Snowden and others have already cracked that case open, lending some credence to the exhortations of conspiranoiacs everywhere. That our metadata is accessible by governments, corporations and malicious third-parties is already a fact of life that we're often ready to rationalize and take somewhat for granted."So many apps are already collecting this data—Pokémon Go is just the latest." - Leigh Honeywell
There are aspects of this game that are no doubt reckless, which is part of its appeal. There isn't any sort of depth to the game itself, but a big part of the conceit is "adventure"—which is always a bit self-destructive because the thrill of going somewhere and maybe finding something new implies a little risk-taking. That can be gratifying even if you don't like what you find. This is also part of why the new update contains little warning popups upon startup, like imploring players not to trespass on private property. At the same time, media amplification of these issues draws the app to the center of a complex of anxiety surrounding technology. Pokémon Go is isolating us. Pokémon Go is alienating us. Pokémon Go is making us less secure, less alert, easier to track, easier to control. Pokémon Go is distracting us from all the real problems, and that's on purpose, and like lemmings we fall in line.On the other hand, for as many doomsayers that the game seems to inspire, you get as many musings about the bright future of augmented reality, odes to the way it offers players new perspectives on the same old world, or zealous exaltations about how the game is this transcendent force bringing people together. Perhaps this in itself tells us something about why Pokémon Go—and more broadly, Pokémon—has a way of becoming a scapegoat for all the world's ills. There's its gargantuan popularity, particularly among children, that always draws a little bit of anxiety, and there's its universal appeal. But what does that really mean?The roving moral panics that Pokémon has always magnetically attracted are not necessarily all unreasonable or totally unfounded. But the real problems at the root of these panics are complicated and full of unsexy little contradictions and compromises and resolutions that are far off from actually becoming reality. Pokémon is just a game, and Pokémon Go is just an app—one of many that are guilty of similar or worse sins that we choose to tolerate all the time.And panics, for their part, don't always have to transform into official moves to persecute and banish scapegoats. It would be absurd to expect people to suddenly opt out of all the apps that mediate modern life and go live off the grid because of Pokémon Go, but perhaps this can have the effect of making people a little less complacent about stuff we take for granted everyday, and a bit more careful. Perhaps Pokémon Go will get some people to further explore the question of information security, and perhaps even get involved in broader internet freedom movements that demand things like transparency, better privacy standards, and the codification of the internet as a public good.The grain of truth from which the devil sprouts is that entertainment apps do have some role to play in our understanding of how technology fits into our lives—the good and the bad. More than that, it reveals the tendency of modern discourse to try to redeem the psychological tortures of capitalism through commodity fetishism and consumption. The anxieties and deferred desires we have about forces that seem so huge and unstoppable suddenly become a lot easier to deal with if we feel like we can foist blame (or hope) on one peculiar thing. Where apps are our salvation to some, to others they are invariably our downfall, with a few people left considering the actual material circumstances that influence their creation. This mass spectacle— in the way that DeBord meant that word—will not stop all the evils of the world, but it allows us to defer the general sense of malaise we all have onto something a little more pocket-sized. It's a process that's typically very alienating, but it's also cathartic.Pokémon's strange, cute, benign universalism allows it to be all things to all people. Even its own canon is a confused, incoherent mass, at times promoting some uncomfortable ideals of noble struggle and at others being an innocent tale about adventure and companionship. Something this fundamentally empty—for if it means everything, it doesn't mean anything—can't help but flatten anything that moves through it. It's another facet of the ongoing spectacle of late capitalism that forces us to dream up monsters that we can fight, capture and have under our control. We impose these monsters feverishly upon reality and then pivot, so that we can seek to root them out of the world's darkest corners.Pokémon's strange, cute, benign universalism allows it to be all things to all people.