from the gotta-spy-on-’em-all! dept
During the great TikTok moral panic of 2022-2025 we noted repeatedly how it was very weird for the public, press, and lawmakers to singularly hyperventilate about the privacy and propaganda impacts of one specific Chinese-owned app while just completely refusing to do anything about the much broader problems that TikTok (and a thousand other companies) exploit every day.
The U.S. is awash in propaganda we do absolutely nothing about. And our corrupt refusal to pass a basic internet-era privacy law (or regulate data brokers) has resulted in a vast, largely unregulated, hyper-surveillance market for your every thought, browsing habit, or movement. Data that’s then routinely sold to any number of random nitwits, including right wing extremists and foreign intelligence services.
We were told repeatedly for years that TikTok posed some kind of very unique threat, even though that threat was not at all unique, and created by the government’s corrupt failure to protect consumer privacy.
The latest case in point: Pokémon Go owner Niantic is selling the game (and all of its collected data) to a company created by the Saudi Arabian government. According to the fine folks at 404 Media, the companies have made numerous blog posts about the acquisition, without any of them talking about what happens to the reams of sensitive location data the company has collected for years:
“Scopely, Niantic, and Savvy Games have collectively published six separate blog posts about the $3.85 billion deal, none of which specifically address what is happening with the location data of Pokémon Go’s 100 million players and none of which address how location data collected in the future will be handled under Scopely and its Saudi Arabian owners.”
Pokémon Go involves you wandering around in an augmented reality to real world places to combat virtual monsters, so it’s a little more detailed in the granular movement data it collects than many games. That data is now squarely in the hands of the Saudi Arabian government, which can then exploit this vast data repository in any way it wants without much in the way of oversight.
Like most data broker adjacent operations the companies involved are convoluted by design to minimize accountability and transparency. 404 Media notes how part of the $3.85 billion deal will involve Niantic spinning off its growing AI mapping business. The deal also involves transfer of Campfire and Wayfarer, two related tools that can also track Pokémon Go player movement in granular detail:
“What is happening here, then, is that an already very complicated and vast location data ecosystem that was previously controlled by only one American company (Niantic) has now become a far more complicated location data ecosystem controlled by an “American” company that is wholly owned by a Saudi Arabian conglomerate whose largest shareholder is the Saudi Arabian government.”
The U.S. refuses to pass a real privacy law for several reasons. One, we’re a corrupt embarrassment of country that routinely prioritizes making money over everything, including public safety, consumer privacy, and national security. Two, our government realizes a privacy law might prevent them from being able to buy U.S. consumer data; an easy end around for getting pesky warrants.
The Saudi Arabian government having easy and direct access to Americans’ sensitive data is every bit as bad as the Chinese government having proxy access to Americans’ sensitive data. And every bit as bad as the countless apps on your phones that are monetizing your movement and choices in granular detail with zero meaningful oversight during surging U.S. authoritarianism.
Yet curiously I’m going to bet the Pokémon Go purchase sees little of the mass hyperventilation that was reserved for TikTok. I’m going to bet guys like Trump FCC Brendan Carr, who was on TV pretty much every week screaming about the privacy ramifications of TikTok, won’t have much to say about Pokémon Go now being owned by the Saudi Arabian government.
Corruption generally means our outrage on this sort of thing is highly selective and phony. TikTok primarily became an exceptional target of ire because Facebook lobbyists wanted to eliminate a competitor, not because our corrupt Congress genuinely and uncharacteristically developed a sudden backbone on consumer privacy.
Of course, much like U.S. privacy law proposals, our big noisy stink about TikTok ultimately resulted in no action either. And now that the United States has elected a used car salesman as king, the hope of privacy laws — or competent regulators consistently protecting consumer interests — seems further away than ever.
We’re truly building something monstrous, and absolutely begging for a privacy scandal that makes the parade of weekly privacy scandals we’re intimately familiar with seem utterly adorable in comparison.
Filed Under: augmented reality, gaming, location data, pokemon go, privacy, saudi arabia, security, surveillance, tracking
Companies: niantic
