Truly dystopian. The Pokémon Company should share the blame for licensing their brand in this way without proper safeguards to prevent the data being used for this, particularly given the background of the Niantic founders

Can you imagine scanning your house, your school, your playground, thinking you're catching Pikachu, then have a drone hit it based on your own footage? Pretty terrifying.

Maybe Nintendo lawyers could show their skin for a good cause at once.

Do you really think Niantic didn't make sure their actual partners didn't agree to their business model?

If there is enough retaliation that Ninendo is connected for using kids to build war machines, I am sure things can change.

Indeed, but should we always assume data of any type we generate for services can be used for malicious means?

To an extent, but realistically it wasn't really reasonable to expect a cutesy Pokemon game to be used for this ten years later. If you had told the average Pokemon Go player this ten years ago you would have been called crazy. The Pokemon Company should have done more to protect their brand (I would hope for regulation too on player-generated real world data like this)

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I think this is where brand licensing gets more complicated than it usually appears

Niantic is what happens when a boardroom is somehow more evil than the ridiculous caricatures we sometimes see in Hollywood. “Alright gentlemen: we need to make a lot of money quickly harvesting every drop of data from kids and adults alike en masse using something they all love that is family-friendly. We are selling it to the military of course, because they’ll pay us tons of money for it. Who’s in?”