Saudi Arabian government company is buying Pokémon go and 100 million players real time location data
Saudi Arabia Buys Pokémon Go, and Probably All of Your Location Data
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!
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.
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
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.
First they came for my event pikachus, then they came for my shiny legendaries...
Waiting for them to further push monetization schemes. I'll bet on stat boosters and shiny rate enhancers for $$.
Too much detail. Needs more jpg
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