Ingress is a virtual reality game utilizing Google Maps that relies upon user to give location data for the game. Users will upload landmarks to the app and Niantic Labs (the company that owns the app) will approve the landmark to be a portal. Users are in two factions, and these can control the portals, and link them using ‘portal links’. The game is one of the most popular GPS-based games, and the portals can be viewed all across the world.
What makes
this game relevant to both enhancing contributions and use of user data is the
information required for a portal – the name, photograph and GPS location of a
landmark, is mined by Niantic Labs and kept for their other app called Field Trip. Field Trip acts as a tourist-style app for the user, showing landmarks,
historical sites, shops and roads, and giving background about them in the form
of videos, photos and a few short paragraphs of information. The data required
to set up these landmarks is taken from Ingress and adapted by Niantic Labs
into a bite-size factoids explaining the area around the users of Field Trip.
Both apps
encourage users to explore the space around them and upload their areas, and
their integration mean that history tours and tourist explanation of places can
be far more in-depth and numerous, as opposed to an ‘official’ tour guide that
would cover seven or eight places, these apps have hundreds of spots, curated
by the developers but created by the users.
A scarier
side to all of this is the wider implications of Google owning Niantic, and
overseeing both Ingress and Field Trip. User data is being uploaded all the
time to Google servers, and there is legitimate concern that the information
pertaining to a user’s whereabouts and their daily routine being used for
purposes not outlined the terms of agreement with a user.
I can see your point on the scepticism of the collection of data Ben - maybe Google should be just coming out and saying what the byproduct of these types of games/experiences are - as long as the user is having fun, many wouldn't mind what the byproduct is. Then again of course, the background feeling of "what is this data really being collected for" is more and more permeating into the general public's level of suspicion. And Google wouldn't really want competitors to know what it is really doing before it is mostly finished.
ReplyDeleteExactly Jason, and with the revelations involving the NSA, we can never really be sure who is looking at the data and for what. This time of web 2.0 is even more treacherous as it is innovative, and we must be careful that we're not being lulled into a false sense of security, not unlike a time written about by George Orwell or Aldous Huxley.
DeleteI'm thinking we're heading more in the direction of Brave New World with Google and other applications placating us with useful services for day-to-day activities, while at the same time tracking everything we do and taking personal information.
It's scary, frankly, and since so much of this is required increasingly in life, I'm not sure how to avert these issues, short of becoming Amish.