It’s not all fun and games: Pokémania sparks privacy issues

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/07/2016 (3350 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I don’t mean to alarm you, but there’s probably a Jigglypuff standing right behind you. Or a Geodude hanging out in the next bathroom stall.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then you’re probably not one of the millions of people already impossibly hooked on Pokémon Go, the location-based augmented reality game that allows people to capture adorable virtual monsters called Pokémon in the real world using their smartphones.

The app uses a phone’s GPS and camera, so you can catch the Pokémon that “appear” around you outside. Different species of Pokémon will appear in different places, from malls to parking lots to back alleys. The game is free but there are plenty of in-app purchases to be had.

To quote Drake/Grandpa Simpson’s elderly neighbour Jasper: “What a time to be alive.”

Pokémon had a major cultural moment before. In the late 1990s, the franchise arrived in North America via a pair of basic (by today’s standards) eight-bit games for the original Nintendo Game Boy — Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue. The premise has remained unchanged through the game’s various iterations; capture various creatures in the wild and train them for battle. The game’s tagline, “Gotta catch ‘em all!”, appealed to obsessive, completionist types, and the monsters’ cuteness lent well to both marketability and ubiquity.

Next came the collectable trading cards, which were just as addictive and popular as the game that inspired them, and a TV show. It wasn’t long before Pikachu, that aggressively adorable yellow mouse, became just as instantly recognizable as a certain other famous cartoon mouse, an avatar of American pop culture and Japanese kawaii culture both.

In 1999, Time magazine ran a piece about “Pokémania,” written in that panicky, hyperbolic Time way: “Parents who have had to suffer through the games, the TV series and shopping trips can take some comfort in the fact the Pokémon demographic is the same one that has abandoned Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Power Rangers. What may be harder to survive is the relentlessness of Pokémania, a multimedia and interactive barrage like no other before it, with children mesmerized into cataloging a menagerie of multiplicative monsters, with trading cards linked to games linked to television shows linked to toys linked to websites linked to candy linked back to where you started — a pestilential Ponzi scheme.”

That seems so quaint now. As it turns out, we didn’t know from Pokémania.

Thanks to our ongoing pop cultural obsession with all things ’90s, it seemed inevitable Pokémon would make a comeback. Nostalgia is a powerful thing, and the children that experienced Pokémania are now adults hunting for Squirtle in alleys. The immersive player experience as well the sense of discovery and exploration that attracted players initially has been amplified by technology.

While the advent of Pokémon Go has had some positive upshots — “Sore Legs Become Pandemic As Pokémon Go Players Accidentally Get Exercise” reads an incredibly accurate headline at the blog Gizmodo — a modern game comes with modern risks. Since the game’s release in the U.S. last Wednesday, various police departments have been compelled to release eminently practical physical safety tips, including don’t play the game while driving and “don’t run into trees.”

But there are also data concerns, too. In order to work, the game needs to access your location and camera, which means it knows where you are. As Ashley Feinberg points out at Gawker, “with those allowances, Pokémon Go (or rather, its parent company Niantic) not only knows where millions of people are at any given point, they could also very well figure out who they’re with, what’s going on around them, and where they’re likely headed next.”

As to what Niantic is or isn’t doing with any data accessed is also difficult to parse; first, it was reported the company could access certain users’ full Google accounts — including Gmail and calendar. But, as many tech writers have pointed out, “full access” could mean lots of things. It doesn’t mean it can read your emails.

Still, when a hot new game is so appealing, so addictive, it’s easy to get caught up in the moment and ignore the fine print. And depending on your level of tech literacy, you might not even be aware of what permissions an app is asking for.

While elements of Pokémon Go are legitimately terrifying if you think about them too hard — invisible monsters roaming wild! — data permissions shouldn’t be one of them. It’s up to us to educate ourselves and know what we’re agreeing to, but it’s also incumbent upon tech companies and developers to be more transparent about what they require from us — and why.

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @JenZoratti