Pokemon Go and the ethics of map data
Both companies had high hopes for Pokémon Go, but neither were prepared for what was about to unfold. “The amount of money that we forecast the game would make in the first year, we made within the first week of launch,” Hanke recalls, shaking his head in disbelief. “The late-night comedians, politicians, morning-show hosts were all mentioning it. It was great to be part of the cultural conversation.”
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But just as there are ethical implications in surveilling the world to amass map data, Niantic had to think hard about its responsibilities if it were to be sending loads of kids on an unsupervised treasure hunt via a device that monitors their location. “Companies have to have a position on how their technology is going to be used,” John says. “I think it’s a trap to say, ‘we’re agnostic, we’re putting the technology out there, somebody might do something bad with it, other people might do something good with it.’ No, I don’t believe that. It is incumbent upon the creators to have a thesis about how it’s going to get used, how it’s going to make the world a better place and why it deserves to exist … It’s really, I think, the responsibility of the CEOs and the board to kind of take control of what’s happening with their technology and be intentional about it.”
How does Hanke weigh up these ethical responsibilities as a tech company? “We’ve worked hard to build the trust of our playing community – and protecting their privacy is an important part of that,” he says. “We only retain location information for the time necessary to operate the game and plan for in-game resources they interact with. After that, we will either remove it from our systems or anonymise it so that it cannot be associated with individual players. We also don’t sell any user information to third parties.”
