Per a request on Facebook, I'll comment on this wall of paranoia regarding Pokémon
I am a mean, nasty, bad person, sitting in a dark bunker cooking up a global mischief. I've spread a game worldwide, the PHYSICAL carriers of which are millions of people all over the globe.
Before, I was just spying on the world from their computers. But I need to go out into the street, into the shower, into the sauna. To places where computers weren't kept before.
I need to know the situation at such-and-such point on the map or in such-and-such region. Not just from a satellite or once a year, but daily, hourly.
People were already walking around with phones everywhere, and that's not news.
I activate my Pokémon and scatter tasks in this region. Thousands of people go out onto the streets, looking for what I've scattered on the map.
They monitor whatever I need. And where I need it.
I collect info on movement, visual, audio, navigational, temporal. Who, where and when, next to what, and how they caught this or that Pokémon.
If we assume that the Nintendo company (Japanese) is controlled by an unknown villain (the text clearly implies an American villain), isn't it simpler to assume that the villain also controls Google, and has been collecting all this data for a long time?
According to recent news, Google has the right to, and possibly even does, collect location, call, and SMS data.
Essentially, I can scour any section of a region, and by user reactions understand where a closed zone is, where reception is bad, or whatever else.
Moreover, I can build networking things to exchange encrypted information, transmit codes, etc..
Essentially, I control the movements of people, making them move their own smartphones and processing power to WHEREVER I NEED THEM.
In principle, this is possible, in practice – quite a few hackers monitor what their devices are doing, and often see suspicious activity. Pokémon has already been disassembled.
I have complete information on smartphone owners and information on their movements.
I used to know about their movements, but now I can even control them.
The game Ingress, authored by Google with the same mechanics as Pokémon, has existed for ages, but for some reason it didn't bother the author.
I own a database of officers, people of particular interest to me, VIPs, etc. - whom I am also able to track with my game.
If an officer isn't that stupid, he still has either kids or a silly little wife. Who is also catching Pokémon.
By engaging the internal capabilities of smartphones, I can draw maps in real time. And scan the space.
It's unclear what is meant here. Spy satellite resolution is already less than a meter.
Not only that. Every Pokémon catcher is a potential weapon targeter, including WMDs.I continue to chew this over....
I am a puppeteer in the office of a certain Agency.
I spread one game, I have two players:Vlad from KrasnoyarskAss57 from Chelyabinsk.
They play, regularly, I observe on my monitor how they catch Pokémon in specific places. I have a map, there are markers.
I know the route of their movements from home to work, to the dacha, to everything and everywhere. Knowing the route - I can divert them or force them to catch Pokémon on any segment of the route, making them spin their camera in any direction I NEED, for example screenshotting tank factories, nuclear warehouses, or secret facilities.
The augmented reality mode in the game is actually not very convenient, and savvy players quickly stop using it, as far as I know.
see above
A secret submarine has to go on a secret voyage, the route is unknown. On board is one fuckwit who was catching Pokémon on his smartphone at his own base.
Identifying him is easy. I scoured the net and found a military guy bragging about serving on a very secret ship and catching Pokémon.
I doubt that servicemen in secret units are even allowed social media accounts. Much less smartphones while on duty.
The sub departs, the fuckwit is off the air.
Two weeks later, the fuckwit starts catching a Pokémon 3000 km away, in a port town where a satellite didn't detect anything special. And intelligence can't infiltrate there or didn't have time. But I already know - the sub is here.
I know the base and I know the final route. After a while, the signal disappears. It means the sub is heading back to base. But I already know the route where to expect it. If needed - I activate a signal. I home a torpedo onto the signal I need. Boom!...
Situation two. I sent out remote-controlled explosives, sealed in a way that can't be scanned at customs. Or delivered bypassing it.
Say I keep the explosive in a container with TVs shipped as cargo from Asia to London. At the port, it's enough to direct a Pokémon catcher to the port area and activate a phone call from his smartphone to the remote detonation device. Boom!
Situation three. I need to track a VIP. Before, they'd send a tail. Now, it's enough to have just one fuckwit in the VIP's security detail catching Pokémon.
How does the author picture this? A security guard on duty running around with a smartphone catching a Pokémon, instead of doing his job ? How long will such a guard last before being kicked out in disgrace?
Situation four. Need to establish external surveillance on a group of people, say VIPs, military, or business.
I activate Pokémon catchers in the immediate vicinity of the persons or locations I need and guide them with the "eyes" and "ears" of the Pokémon catchers. I can easily find out - whether a car is parked in the right spot, or whether the right person entered the right door.Situation five. Knowing a certain key and cipher, simply by the movement of the catchers and their Pokémon targets, I can transmit any information I need.
Pokémon are tied to Ingress database objects – cultural and historical monuments. As soon as the described situations start occurring on a massive scale, the people who really care about this will see in the analytics that Pokémon players are being directed to places other than stated.
There are tons of such situations. Now for the main thing.
There's nothing bad about augmented reality technology itself.It's a cool development, if not for one thing. Any cool technology - will always be used for more than just its intended purpose. It's hard to notice, except perhaps by persistent advertising or aggressive promotion of a product that wouldn't have become so popular under natural conditions.
There are plenty of products that became popular by a whim of fate, I'm too lazy to even give examples.
No commercial firm, no developer, except for a couple of major giants or intelligence agencies, could pull off such aggressive marketing across the ENTIRE globe.
What does marketing have to do with it? My feed is full of people sharing about Pokémon, nobody paid them anything.
Especially a firm like Pokémon or its partner - Nintendo.
But it's - obvious.
And behind the promotion, just like back then, behind Facebook and its unprecedented success when the company was near bankruptcy - stands a certain
FORCE.
Proof?
Not only that. I declare.
Having the ability to observe the planet both from satellites and from stationary computers, mobile devices, and now also knowing how to direct them to the locations and places I need - I essentially control the world.
Whoever has access to the Google database, the Pokémon database, the Facebook database, the WhatsApp database, and the Instagram database - essentially sees and hears the WHOLE WORLD.
This is true, the question is that there is no particular proof that the US government has access to them. On the contrary, there are constant lawsuits with the US government where companies refuse to disclose user data. The Snowden and WikiLeaks leaks show that while intelligence agencies sometimes had limited access, nothing indicates that they had mass access.
I'm not saying it doesn't exist, or that it's impossible, I'm just saying there is no particular proof of it yet. The author's fantasies have a right to exist, of course, but he passes them off as reality.
An ordinary layman doesn't care about this and it doesn't bother him, on the contrary - it brings a thrill, etc.But I recommend certain countries and agencies to think about it.
At the right moment, toys will stop being toys and will become targeting systems, detonation activators, signal decoders and encoders, and operation guides.
You'd think certain countries and agencies aren't aware, and the author discovered America. All these scenarios were chewed over in detail by sci-fi writers and futurologists, Vernor Vinge in particular, decades ago.
And now for the main thing.
The core functions of such a dual system haven't even been activated yet. And if we lose time - the system will be supplemented with modules, including active ones, up to AI or pinpoint strike targeting systems, hacking of computer systems, etc..Catching a Pokémon in a server room? Or in the office of a major corporation? Congratulations!
For your system, this is now worse than syphilis is for you.
And you know why?
Because I, the evil and malicious Dark Lord, know for sure that a Pokémon catcher is hanging out, for example, in a "Gazprom" office. And at the right moment, I just activate the smartphone's camera, its microphone, and read any information.
If the author is so worried about all this, let him panic some more: backdoors at the processor level are very, very hard to detect. Processors are designed in the US, made in China. Both countries certainly have them in many devices we use. The only way out is to create your own processor, memory, motherboard, and software from scratch. That's what the military does.
Civilians, as we see, prefer convenient and functional devices designed in the West and manufactured in the East. There are no ways to change the situation, and none are foreseen.
Conclusions. Yes, all this is possible, but it was possible a long time ago. Pokémon don't pose any special additional danger. The modern world is economically intertwined so tightly that it's completely unclear how you can drop out of it, except by banning everything created by the West and China.
Moreover, Russia has long had similar systems for tracking and processing mass data from smartphones, and there the intelligence services are much more likely to have full data, at a minimum, on smartphone movements, email, and social media correspondence, simply due to the political climate and the non-existence of an independent judicial system.
Overall, the author looks like an emotional teenager who discovered that life can give you a boo-boo, and free cheese only comes in a mousetrap.