If I recall correctly, Strava had precisely this unintended consequence -- if you saw someone using the app to run laps in the middle of nowhere, it was likely a military base.

Yep.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...

Savvy criminals were also using Strava to nab high end bicycles.

>Who's to say that intelligence orgs or other interested parties wouldn't create or piggyback on things like this for a source of high granularity location data?

How is this sort of location data useful? Sure, my day to day walking around is useful, but like parent said above, data is only recorded when you're actively playing the game. So you'd get a bunch of location data of... people going to the places the game wants them to go. You can't really do anything with that.

Head over here: https://outgress.com/

See the activity heat map about halfway down the front page? That is (or could be) a single person's play pattern. It is ludicrously easy to figure out where the average player works, if they play at work. It's often easy to figure out where they live. There are enough points of interest in any urban area so that game activity tracks where you typically go, not just where the game wants you to go.

And that site is using a fairly crude, incomplete method for scraping. It doesn't capture everything by any means.

It's pretty easy to do something with that info. Let's say there's a pokestop on a military installation, then most visitors are likely to be military personnel, and now we have a list of phones of military personnel. What's more, we can learn which troops are deployed to which bases, and patterns about how troops get redeployed to different bases.

How is this useful? Well, it's well known that Ft. Meade in the US is an NSA outpost. If troops from Ft. Meade regularly get transferred to Camp Pendleton (chosen arbitrarily), then we can infer that there's likely to be a lot of SIGINT (electronic spying) activity at Camp Pendelton. For a smaller installation (say a covert safe house abroad), these sorts of clues may be the first signs that foreign intelligence agencies can use to detect that these bases even exist.

ok.. and if one weren't military personnel? The original comment seemed to be raising some kind of unspecified fear about this in general, not just for a small segment of the population who frankly should know better.

Well, one could get unsuspecting users to take pictures around all kinds of facilities and such. Consider too that if you have multiple databases of this sort, you can draw a lot of inferences based on who is usually around whom.

You still haven’t provided a reason why this is a bad thing. Ok, so there are unsuspecting users taking photos of the local YMCA facilities. What you’re talking about is similar to the social graph but on a much smaller scale. The only reasonable use is for advertising. The world’s not going to end.

Foreign intelligence services are likely just as interested in hiring FAANG employees as they are soldiers. A compromised Googler could get them lots of access.

Yeah but a phone is also a device collecting tons of useful metadata - nearby towers,wifi routers, bt devices and even the most secured iPhones can be turned leaky with enough access.

Simply get into an iPhone of a known location based app gamer and then add a pokestop to a location. Even if the gamer gets picked up it won't be too suspicious since they'll have a history of going to lots of random locations. Even if the hack is detected by a suspicious organization, the phone will have transmitted the info out by the time they detect the hack.

This is just one poorly thought out scenario, there are lots of things you can do with phones nowadays - use them as collection tools, relays etc

> How is this sort of location data useful?

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/28/fitness-tracki...

> Sure, my day to day walking around is useful, but like parent said above, data is only recorded when you're actively playing the game. So you'd get a bunch of location data of... people going to the places the game wants them to go. You can't really do anything with that.

Of course you can. You can for instance see where people can't go because the area is restricted.

Pokémon go has an option to track your location when the app is in the background, even though that location is almost never useful. This is actually a regression from a previous version, which synced with Apple’s health APIs to track steps without tracking location. It’s not hard to guess why they removed that feature.

I would imagine most players are recording data at all times - the game harasses you nearly nonstop, every time you launch, attempt to catch, randomly walking around to enable "adventure sync", which is "always location".

> Gotta tell you, this whole thing reads as seriously creepy.

Yes. That was exactly my point.

> You've gotta be a bit naive to just assume it's completely innocent.

I certainly didn't assume anything of the sort.