For years, users of these technologists’ products—from Google Street View to Pokémon Go—have been questioning how far they’re going with users’ information and whether those users are adequately educated on what they’re giving up and with whom it’s shared. In the process, those technologists have made mistakes, both major and minor, with regards to user privacy. As Niantic summits the world of augmented reality, it’s engineering that future of that big-money field, too. Should what Niantic does with its treasure trove of valuable data remain shrouded in the darkness particular to up-and-coming Silicon Valley darlings, that opacity might become so normalized that users lose any expectation of knowing how they’re being profited from. [...] In his GDC talk, Hanke continued on to describe another one of Niantic’s goals, one that may read as innocuous to starry-eyed ‘90s kids who wanted nothing more than a Poké-pal to travel with: “to build stuff that brings the digital and physical world together.” Depending on how you’re looking at it, that can mean an immersive Pokémon experience or, in Hanke’s terms, “ubiquitous computing,” which he said in 2016 meant adding “computing interfaces to everything you encounter in the physical world.” [...] Ubiquitous computing isn’t sitting at your desktop playing World of Warcraft for 13 hours, or even using your phone to navigate from your friend’s house to the nearest liquor store. It’s the seamless integration of the digital world into the physical one, anywhere, at any time. Also referred to as “mediated reality,” ubiquitous computing, to some, is the science fiction fantasy of Star Trek, where tasks are mediated by an objective, neutral computation system. It was the vision of Google Glass, the $1,500 device that, through voice commands, could take photos, search on Google, view your calendar or receive travel alerts. Google Glass never caught on, although in his talk, Hanke was adamant that the future of AR is wearable technology. At 2019’s GDC, Hanke showed a video titled “Hyper-Reality,” by the media artist Keiichi Matsuda. It’s a dystopian look at a future in which the entire world is slathered with virtual overlays, an assault on the senses that everyone must view through an AR headset if they want to participate in modern society. In the video, the protagonist’s entire field of vision is a spread of neon notifications, apps, and advertisements, all viewed from a seat at the back of a city bus. Their hands swipe across a game they’re playing in augmented reality, while in the background an ad for Starbucks Coffee indicates they won a coupon for a free cup. Push notifications in their periphery indicate three new messages and directions for where to exit the bus. Walking through the aisle, where digital “get off now!” signs indicate it’s their stop, and onto the street, the physical world is annotated with virtual information. The more tasks they accomplish, the more points they receive. The whole world is now one big game. It showed a definitively dystopian vision of a world in which the barriers between IRL and URL have been fully collapsed. [...] “Some people would say AR is a bad thing because we’ve seen this vision of how bad it can be,” Hanke said. “The point I want to make to you all is, it doesn’t have to be that way.” [...] Hanke described a world where people can better navigate public transit and understand their surroundings because of digital mapping initiatives like Niantic. He talked about the possibility of hologram tour guides in San Francisco, and how they’d rely on a digital map to navigate their surroundings, and about designing shared experiences of Pokémon games in a Pokémon-augmented world. Cute, nice things for nice people who love cute things. Ubiquitous computing is still a fantasy, but not because the technology isn’t ready. It is. The fantasy is that any system mediating someone’s personal experience of the physical world that uses a modern corporation’s digital infrastructure would be objective or neutral. Humans are data and data is money, and this is the business model of many of the technology firms up to the task of ubiquitous computing. [...] After a brief post-college stint with the U.S. Foreign Service, Hanke joined the game developer Archetype Interactive and shipped Meridian 59, the first massively multiplayer online role-playing game with 3D graphics. [...] The CIA’s venture capital investment firm, In-Q-Tel, took a particular interest in Keyhole. According to a 2003 press release, within two weeks of In-Q-Tel’s investment, Keyhole’s tech was implemented to support Pentagon initiatives in Iraq. [...] The February 2005 launch of Google Maps, soon followed by the launch of Google Earth, were met with falling-over-itself fanfare from the California techies. [...] Foreign governments trembled, citing concerns that private military facilities would be discovered. (“They ought to have asked us,” said India’s surveyor general to the New York Times.) [...] It cost Google a lot of money to acquire all this data. It paid an army of telemarketers to pester tens of millions of businesses worldwide for up-to-date information on their operations and locations. It paid tens of millions of dollars to organizations like Digital Globe for their satellite imagery of cities. When Google launched Street View in 2007, bringing eye-level perspectives of major cities to users with smartphones or computers, its data collection methods were a little different, and a little more controversial. [...] In 2010, Germany’s data protection commission noticed something shady about Google’s fleet of image-vacuuming vans. Their sensors were eating, or “sniffing,” traffic from wireless networks that were unencrypted, and in the process, scooping up emails, medical information, financial records, audio and video files, and passwords. Hanke, still in charge of Google Geo, said he didn’t know anything about it. Google later apologized, saying it had “mistakenly included code in our software that collected samples of payload data from WiFi networks.” [...] In five days of gameplay, Niantic kept 2304 location records for one player. By looking at the timestamps and frequency with which this user would return to particular areas, we were able to correctly identify their employer and address of residence. Furthermore, by plotting these data points on a map we could correctly discern the routes the user took from work to home, their daily schedule, and even their eating habits. When we asked them about their propensity to eat Burger King for lunch, they were surprised that we knew that, saying afterwards that they were “addicted to fast food.” [...] In this computational future, all of this detail comes collectively from us, and relies on turning over a great deal of information to companies with business interests that are often at odds with our own. As one former Niantic employee put it: “It is almost irrelevant to talk about the company’s original intent [...] Continua su https://kotaku.com/the-creators-of-pokemon-go-mapped-the-world-now-theyre-18... Lunga ma interessantissima lettura. Giacomo