The Culture Punch Podcast

CPP EP 110 | Caught in the Map: The Dark Side of Pokémon Go's GPS Use

• Kid Culture • Episode 110

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Location, Location, Location! In this episode, we dive into the fascinating world of Pokémon GO—an app that not only gets players out and about catching virtual creatures but also collects valuable GPS data to map the real world.


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(upbeat music) All right, y’all, I got something that I wanna talk to you guys about, but before I get into that, I just wanna give one shout out real quick to the company road. For those of you guys that are in the audio game, you guys know that road makes some amazing products. And just so you know, this video is not sponsored by road, but I recently had my roadcaster two have an issue with this faceplate where the adhesive was starting to come off. And I reached out to them, and here’s the good thing about it, okay? So a lot of people that call any kind of place for warranties, if you get one guy, you know that it’s not gonna be the same message delivered to the next guy, right? So if you get one guy, he’s gonna tell you one thing, if you have to call back and you get another guy, he’s gonna tell you a whole ’nother thing, am I right? The good thing about this is I called early in the morning, and I guess it was before their California office opened. So it routed me to their UK office. I’m not sure exactly where in the UK they took my call, but it was somewhere in the UK. I forget the gentleman’s name, I can go back into my emails, and I wish I would have, so I can give him a shout out, but he was great. I explained the issue to him, he explained to me that, you have another month or so before we do the warranty expires, why not send it in and we’ll get it fixed? So I was like, okay, cool. So he walked me through the process, I sent some pictures in, and he said, based on the conversation that we had, it should be warrantied, he’s like, but send your pictures in, proof or receipt, all that stuff, and I’m gonna send you an email right now. So I said, okay, cool. So I did that, I waited about 30 minutes, and I didn’t receive an email, and a lot of times the reason is, is because my last name, people misspell my last name, or they hear it different, and so I was like, you know what, maybe I mumbled it, whatever I called back, I get someone else this time. Here’s the good thing, the California office opened at that time, and I knew none of this stuff, right? I knew none of this before I called this one time. I knew nothing about how they routed it and all that stuff, but I called, and this guy didn’t have an accent, he was American, and he tells me, oh yeah, you spoke to so-and-so from our UK office, and then he read me the notes of our conversation, and it was almost like a word-for-word transcript, so not only did this gentleman from the UK take the notes properly down, but the US had access to it like that, and they went in and saw, okay, no, I see it here, you’re gonna get an email, he’s like, the email hasn’t been sent yet. I was like, oh, okay, can you just verify the email address, because I figured I may not have pronunciated it right or whatever, and I coulda came off as mumbled. He read it back to me, it was my proper email, he says, if you don’t get this in a few hours, reach back out to us, but it’s in the process it’s being taken care of. So I was like, all right, cool, so that was a great thing, that was, for me, it was like, you know what, they have their notes, whatever system they’re running, they’re both on the same page, because I spoke to someone in the UK, 20 minutes later, whatever it was, the US office opened, they already had the exact notes of what I was calling about, he knew exactly as though I had talked to this guy from the USA, and it was a slow and easy process. I sent it in, now if you’re gonna send anything into road, I don’t know the process other than the roadcaster, but you do have to pay for your own shipping, right? And for those of you guys that know how much a roadcaster costs, you don’t want this to get damaged or anything, you don’t wanna take any chances, right? So I ended up claiming value when I shipped it through UPS, it’s worth 750 bucks after taxes, right? So I claimed value on it, so my shipping ended up costing me $45. They did ship it to me, the same exact model I had, I figured they just re-glued the faceplate, and for the most part, they did a good job, it seems a little lifted in the middle, but I’m not too concerned about it. The thing that I liked about it was the process was easy, the instructions were very straightforward, and it was no hassle, it was just send it in, and if it weren’t to, it weren’t to, if not, we’ll send it back, and that was that. But I mean, their communication on, hey, we just sent the email, hey, they got approved, hey, go ahead and ship it, hey, we saw that you shipped it, was amazing, they were so straightforward, transparent, it was so great, and I have multiple road projects, and I’m gonna continue to buy road, not only because of their 10-year warranty on their microphones, but now I have the experience of their customer service. So for those of you guys out there who are looking into podcasting, YouTubeing, whatever it is, I don’t know if you could beat Roadcasters’ worldwide customer service, let’s say, right? So I know this is like a five minute tangent on that, but I wanna thank Road, and I just wanna give them a shout out because of how great of a company they are. Now, the reason why we’re doing this podcast, so I have another kind of episode in mind that I’m wondering if I’m gonna do that by myself, or I’m gonna do that with a guest, but I saw something the other day, and this isn’t new news, but this is something that I wanted to bring to my listeners and discuss because you always have these kind of thoughts whenever you give permissions for certain apps, right? If they ask you for your contacts, like, why do they want my contacts? Are they selling the contact information? So you’re not ever really protected when it comes to that, right? Like you yourself can do whatever you want to stay off grid, but if you’re in someone’s phone and they ask for their contact and they say yes, they have it, Facebook asks for it, right? So it makes messaging easier. Yes, well now guess what? Facebook, the biggest data collecting company I’m sure in the world, I don’t know that for a fact, but I’m assuming now has your information. Anyway, when you give apps your information, you kind of have an idea that something’s gonna happen or it’s being sold or whatever, but until it’s really told to you and how divisive and how they maneuver in the shadows to do these things, it doesn’t, I mean, me, I know it’s there and I’m very cautious of that, and I’m very cautious at the same time too on what I give permissions to if they doesn’t need it. Like if I’m doing an audio app and it says access to your contacts, you don’t need access to my contacts. You know what I’m saying? If I’m doing my photos, let me get your location. Now I’m good, I’ll remember where I was, you know what I mean? Like I don’t want location tags on my photos. So I do things like that, but you don’t know exactly the extent of it until it’s kind of repeated back to you or told to you or slapped you in the face. And so that’s exactly what I came across when I saw this video discussing Pokemon Go. So let’s go ahead, I’m gonna play the audio clip. Again, this is for entertainment purposes only, okay? So I don’t know on the right standing this stuff. This is just, what is it, fair, whatever discussion, right? So I’m gonna play the audio clip and then after the audio clip, we’ll discuss. So Pokemon Go was a scam. Niantic just announced that they have been taking the data from Pokemon Go and using it to build one of the largest geo models for navigation ever. And so basically all the people who’ve been playing Pokemon Go over the years have been free geo navigators. And they would, when they wanted something to be geo located or pictures of an area to be taken, they would put Pokemon in those areas so people would go out there and take the pictures and navigate the areas all while being tracked by their GPS navigation devices. That’s crazy. That’s thinking a hundred steps ahead, creating a game to make people go and do your geo tracking for you so that you can create a mapping service to sell. And they were also making money off the Pokemon game because they were selling people the Pokeballs and the items and the fashion stuff. And that’s crazy. I understand this is why these people are millionaires, billionaires. These are why these people run companies. - That kind of goes on talking about a little bit, you know, tangent about that, but I mean, wow, right? Pokemon Go, that was such a big game. Now I didn’t play it again because of the location giveaway, but that was such a big game. I knew so many people that played it. My best friend, him and his now wife, that was how they bonded when they first started in their relationship. Like they would make it a weekend before they had kids. They would make it a weekend to go out and go to these locations to catch, I don’t know if it was red Pokemon, I wanna say probably was, but they would make it a weekend. And it was something that they bonded over. Like it was an infrastructure part of their relationship. And now let me tell you a story about the same couple. So my best friend, he lived in the house and I can’t remember the exact details. I don’t believe he worked at night, but I know for whatever reason, there were times at night where either he was in bed or he was working or not at home or whatever. And his now wife was at their house and she would see these strange people just showing up in their front yard. Well, not technically in their front yard, more so on the sidewalk in the front of their house, right? And she would be like, there’s random people always just showing up and they’re just staring. It seems like they’re scouting the house or they’re scouting the house. And so she got really worried about it. And so one day they saw somebody and my friend went to go confront him. I was like, what are you doing here? And lo and behold, he’s there because there was a freaking medical center or is it a medic center that was right there or a Pokemon or something that was right in front of his house. They put it right in front of his house. And so people would go there to, I think it was a med center. So they would go to rejuvenate their Pokemon. And it’s like, can you really, you can do that. You can put it in front of a residential neighborhood, a residential address to where all these people in the middle of the night are going. And I’m talking about like 10 PM and beyond. That’s when these people are showing up for whatever reason. So that’s just one of the experiences I had, not firsthand, but I heard of with Pokemon and how scary that can be because imagine the people that it draws. Now let’s go back to some of the stories that they used to, that used to be in the news to remember that there was predators that would go and prey on children with the Pokemon go and say, hey, I will drive you to this exotic place or to get this exotic Pokemon, I’ll take you. Let’s go together. And kids would get in, and then they would get kidnapped or they would get essayed or whatever. Do you guys remember that? That was a real thing where predators actually used Pokemon go as a way to prey on children. So there’s always people out there that are gonna be creepy. You gotta be cautious of these things, especially when you’re targeting kids, how easy it is to manipulate a child and how disgusting it is for an adult to take advantage of that. And there’s so many people out there that do it. But going back to, going back to the whole, we’re gonna have your location or you’re doing it for us. Now the guy was making kind of good points and he was heading to a place where he’s saying like, these millionaires are so smart that they are saying, you know what, we’re gonna disguise it in a game or we’re gonna allow these people to go and get these locations for us. We need images of these locations. We don’t need to go pay someone to go do that. Matter of fact, we’re gonna double dip because we’re gonna charge these people to buy Pokeballs and things within the game, keep playing the game, and then they’re gonna be creating the biggest geomap ever known to man for us. So yeah, they’re double dipping. They’re charging you and they’re using you for a purpose without even knowing. So it goes to show you that you don’t really know the extent of what you’re giving when you say yes, you can have my location ’cause they can do whatever they want with it. And right now we don’t know exactly what that looks like, what, you know, are they gonna use that information for good or evil? But you can assume that it’s probably not gonna be used for good or if there are good intentions there, they’re probably gonna eventually be used in a wrong way by someone else. That’s what’s so terrible about things like this, but we are quick to give it and kids, oh my gosh, I can only imagine how the kids were probably begging their parents, "Please, can we do this? "Can we do that?" Having them on phone or allowing the location to do these things like, goes to show you. It really goes to show you that we have no idea what they’re doing in the background. Millionaires move in silence, right? In the shadows and look how smart they are. Double dipping, getting all this information. One of the biggest mobile games probably ever, you know, Clash of Clans is probably another one, Call of Duty Mobile now is probably there, but you know, what’s the other one, the Candy Crush probably the other one, but this game is so manipulative to be able to do that and they have the right, who’s gonna stop them? They have the permission to do that. Like, do you really understand what we just heard? Like, let that sink in for a minute. You were used as a pawn to take pictures of locations without pay in order to save millionaires money, but still do a job. And on top of that, you had to spend money in order to fulfill what you, your interest at that time, which was to catch Pokemon, because you had to buy the Pokeballs. So not only did you spend your time, your money, your fuel on these things, but you were being manipulated the whole time and had no idea. And this is a game that was, how old is this game now? Seven years, maybe a little more? Who knows how innovative they become with that game or other games, or the things that are gonna start coming out about other games that you’re giving your rights to, ’cause everything gets sold, even T-Mobile, these phone companies Verizon, they all sell your information for a shiny penny. That’s how these scammers get all this money. Now there is a cool thing that I will say, AI is a very scary thing. There’s a lot of things that aren’t regulated with it, but there is one thing that I wanna show you guys. Let me pull it up real quick, and then I will show you, give me one second. - Oh scammers, I’m your worst nightmare. I’m an AI created by O2 to waste phone scammers time. So W’s then a dot. - Returns W and then dot. I think your profession is bothering people, right? I’m just trying to have a little chat. - It’s nearly been an hour for the love of. - Gosh, how time flies. - It’s showing me a picture of my cat Fluffy. - It’s showing you a picture of your cat Fluffy. Stop calling me dear, you stupid. - Got it dear. Because while they’re busy talking to me, they can’t be scamming you, and let’s face it dear, I’ve got all the time in the world. So that’s one thing that I think AI did good. They have an old lady that’s wasting these people’s time so that way they don’t scam me. That’s pretty cool. But I know that’s a little bit aside from what I wanted to talk about, but stay vigilant people, ’cause realistically, this stuff ain’t no joke. You know what I’m saying? Like this stuff is real, this stuff is, it’s scary, you know? So they’re careful. And that’s all I gotta say, just be careful. Out there, really read the terms and agreements. I know a lot of people don’t, but know what you’re giving up whenever you give up certain access to your phone, because you don’t know how it’s gonna be used. So yeah, I know that’s probably old news. You guys have probably heard it, but at the same time, that was something that I hadn’t heard, and it shocked me when I heard it. Like that they can just double dip like that and use us as pawns like that. But like I said, stay vigilant. Thank you guys, Culture Punch Podcast. Go on any platform you can listen to us. Go to the website at, I believe it’s culturepunchpodcast.com. All our episodes are there. Check out the YouTube channel at Culture Punch Studios. I haven’t really been too active on there, but I am gonna start doing some videos. And I’m gonna be doing more reaction videos on there too. And so things like what you just heard are gonna be in the video box, so that way you guys can pretty much see it with me. Get the reaction, we can discuss it. And then obviously we can build a community off of that so you guys can continue to send me things so that way I can, what is the word I’m looking for? Review them on the channel for you guys. So thank you guys for tuning in, Culture Punch Podcast. I’m Kid Culture, I’m out. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)