this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2025
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Privacy
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Too much detail. Needs more jpg
I don’t see as any worse, necessarily. For all I know, Saudi Arabia was previously buying the data from Niantic piecemeal.
Forbes, 2016: How Niantic Is Profiting Off Tracking Where You Go While Playing 'Pokémon GO'
While true, I felt (if misguided) more comfortable with my data under California data protection laws than Saudi Arabia.
As a European, I never feel comfortable with my data under any US state's data protection laws.
Yeah, but we can't have real data privacy laws in the US. Won't you think of the shareholders?
They've gotten rich off of spying on you wholesale and selling the information to anybody with cash.
It would be rude and un-American to ask them to stop profiting off of morally bankrupt practices. Plus, they'd just say no and they own the government too.
OK so instead of tracking journalists with NSO spyware and murdering them,
they won't even have to install NSO anymore.
prepare to see news reports of many more mysterious murders, and obvious assassinations.
Next up, Saudi Arabia buys the Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel smartphone lines. Pokemon Go comes installed in the system partition for free with 1000 free PokeCoins, how generous!
and then absolutely everyone I talk to will do usual 'oh it's not that bad , you're over reacting' with the additional "I don't use it but I still have it installed"
My mom: "hey honey how do I uninstall this Pokeman Go app? The uninstall button is greyed out. It's using 20% of my storage and battery"
All shinnies spawn at their embassy :sob emoji:
Pikmin Bloom too
Booooo. That sucks.
I was never into Pokemon before this app but this game was fun just finding new discoveries even in my own city.
Luckily geocaching is still a thing!
Now that sounds like the perfect replacement for Pokémon Go for me, which means it's an app I'll install as a way to motivate me to go walk outside and then feel guilty because I just don't.
Too bad it is $30/year for the app to work.
Geocaching isn't limited to a single app... Go find a geocaching website and punch the coords into whatever mapping app you use.
I thought it was all through groundspeak.
Nope! Geocaching was a thing long before phone apps were a thing.
I used to geocache back when i had to get coordinates from geocaching.com and put them into my Garmin handheld gps. But I had gone looking for a cache my dad found on accident while camping and to view it on their website we had to have premium. Same thing with almost all of the caches around my town and surrounding county.
Are there sites other than groundspeak's geocaching.com? I searched DDG last night and everything was an article about geocaching and lead back to geocaching.com or was geocaching.com.
I have considered looking into letterboxing, a friend used to do that while i geocached, but I never did it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geocaching
Started officially in 2000, coinciding (but not by coincidence) with a more-accurate GPS network. Long before what would now be considered "smart" devices (Palm Pilot, Handspring Visor, etc) had any sort of GPS abilities. You had to have, or know someone who owned, a handheld GPS device.
Street Complete lets you walk around and answer questions that go to OSM
Business ethics? Meh, just profits, just profits.
Unregulated Capitalism.
Always has been, and nothing will continue to be done about it.
But it's "just business". You can't blame them. That's the get out of jail free card, often literally.
/s
I can't believe Saudi Arabia are nationalising Pokemon Go when the UK won't even nationalise regional water monopolies. Honestly these things were never great for privacy and given the state of things I'm not sure I'm more concerned about a Saudi entity tracking me than a US one.
Not good news for gay Pokemon fans in that country though.
In the end all that changes is a Saudi company on NSA checks instead of a US one.
Gotta catch them all!
Jokes on them i've been cheating on this game with my location as some random places for a decade and lot of people have been doing this too.
It’s been fun. Once this is official I guess it’s over for me.
It was a rip off from the start..
I must confess, I was into it as well, but the game design was it to be so omnipresent that it hindered me on other tasks, so that I had to stop. I can’t play this game casually 😆 either all in or nothing, lol
Now add a new update that would encourge players to walk inside a Saudi Embassy... 💀
Any source that is readable without an account?
lol this is a crazy
F
Saudi Arabia really likes to invest in dead tech.
They don't care about the tech, they care about the data.
You give them too much credit on this one. This decision was likely spearheaded by some nepo appointment who is out to diversify in the worst way. When your send cousin Johnny to college in the West, you're still not getting the best and brightest when he comes back. Whole structure of their investment fund is graft and bad decisions.
Compare Saudis system to Norway's sovereign fund. Instead of being politically neutral, like everything in the house of Saud it's a patronage system. They do big headline buys like this to convince everybody above them they're actually doing something to diversify from oil market shocks. But in this case they're buying a dry well that's already had it's data sold to those who wanted it and is burdened to IP licensing that likely drains much of its micro transaction potential while also being able to be revoked if the parent company stops liking what they're doing. They're not going to get much from a state security standpoint from it that they couldn't get in ways that would cost several billion less and they're not going to get much of a return of investment on it either. But since patronage rewards are front loaded they do stupid buys like this.
If they just wanted the data, they could've gotten it for much less than 3.8 billion. They likely could've gotten it for 3.7 billion less at least. Or just send some guys to steal it like they did with Twitter back in the day. Much cheaper.
Dead tech so many people play Pokemon go.
Sure but they're just buying a licensed property with a declining player base and leaving Niantic with the base tech and the drive to innovate. It's a dead end road where they're buying the "secure" part of the company but it's actually incredibly high risk because of how licensing agreements work. That's why I call it dead tech. They're not going to build anything out of it. It'll just decline. Perhaps quite catastrophically at that.
they need to branch out from thier dying, single industry, oil. they have been lapping up sports teams all over. turns out the desert is not a good place to live with little to no natural resources outside of oil. also being desert theres little to no arable land.
Waiting for them to further push monetization schemes. I'll bet on stat boosters and shiny rate enhancers for $$.
First they came for my event pikachus, then they came for my shiny legendaries...