Breaking

Friday, October 18, 2019

Augmented reality: mobile games know everything about you

Augmented reality: mobile games know everything about you

Become famous with Pokemon Go, augmented reality games need a GPS chip to allow players to move in reality. An American media wanted to know more about the data collected ... And it's rather scary.

With the release this summer of Wizards Unite, a game based on the Harry Potter universe, Niantic has gained new players using its augmented reality applications that include titles like Pokémon Go or Ingress. At first glance, great news from a developer who wants to get the players moving and summarizes his mission in three words: exploration, exercise and social. However, these games that bring together the real world and the virtual world not only map the Earth, it also tracks its users.

The Kotaku website conducted a survey to better understand how data collection works. They asked ten European players to claim their data from Niantic through the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). They discovered information such as the number of calories burned during a session, the distance traveled, the promotions with which they interacted, and especially location data.

Data to know all the habits of the players

On average, the game Wizards Unite recorded the location thirteen times per minute during the game, double Pokémon Go. For one of the players, they discovered at least one piece of information per hour, at any time of the day. at night, indicating that the game collects data even without being open!

By analyzing the data of one of the players, they were able to correctly identify the home and the workplace, the path taken between the two, their daily habits, and even that they regularly eat fast food. In another case, they were able to derive information when another user deviated from their usual activities. He went to the pharmacy in the morning and did not use the app at night. They correctly deduced that he or a member of his family was sick, which the player confirmed, indicating that he was one of his children.

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop

Privacy threatened by games

By revealing to these volunteers the information they could obtain by analyzing their data, the Kotaku employees had almost unanimous reactions of surprise, the players not imagining that the applications collected as much information, and especially that it was possible to learn as much about their lives. Some said they limited their use of games. The players in question have been able to access detailed data through the European regulation, but Niantic has indicated that they do not share this data with third parties. All data resold to other companies are anonymized, statistics such as how many people have been to that location or how many have interacted with an object in play.

Data collection is a real invasion of privacy and it is not enough to anonymize data to protect users. Researchers have shown that only four locations associated with the exact time of their survey are needed to identify a user from a collection of data. The collection and resale of data in the form of games could lead to a dystopia where privacy has disappeared, like that imagined by the artist Keiichi Matsuda in his clip Hyper-Reality, above


No comments:

Post a Comment