Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, the latest game from the company behind Pokémon Go, lets players harness the magic of their childhood to combat monsters and collect shimmering digital artifacts across their local neighborhoods. Niantic's apps certainly encourage gamers to get outdoors and get active, but behind the scenes, Wizards Unite is quietly casting another spell: collecting a surprising amount of data about where you go.
Today, when you use Wizards Unite or Pokémon Go or any of Niantic's other apps, your every move is getting documented and stored—up to 13 times a minute, according to the results of a Kotaku investigation. Even players who know that the apps record their location data are usually astonished once they look at just how much they've told Niantic about their lives through their footsteps.
From the player's perspective, the Wizarding World is manifesting itself into their real one. But what's happening behind the scenes, and what does Niantic see? Players give Wizards Unite permission to track their movement using a combination of GPS, Wi-Fi, and mobile cell tower triangulation. To understand the extent of this location data, Kotaku asked for data from European players who had all filed personal information requests to Niantic under the GDPR, the European digital privacy legislation designed to give EU citizens more control over their personal data. Niantic sent these players all the data it had on them, which the players then shared with Kotaku.
The files we received contained detailed information about the lives of these players: the number of calories they likely burned during a given session, the distance they traveled, the promotions they engaged with. Crucially, each request also contained a large file of timestamped location data, as latitudes and longitudes.
In total, Kotaku analyzed more than 25,000 location records voluntarily shared with us by 10 players of Niantic games. On average, we found that Niantic kept about three location records per minute of gameplay of Wizards Unite, nearly twice as many as it did with Pokémon Go. For one player, Niantic had at least one location record taken during nearly every hour of the day, suggesting that the game was collecting data and sharing it with Niantic even when the player was not playing.
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."
It's important to note that the personal data that players requested from Niantic and voluntarily shared with Kotaku is, according to Niantic, not something that a third party could buy from them, or otherwise be allowed to see. "Niantic does not share individual player data with third party sponsored location partners," a representative said, adding that it uses "additional mechanisms to process the data so that it cannot be connected to an individual."
Niantic's Kawai told Kotaku that the anonymized data that Niantic shares with third parties is only in the form of "aggregated stats," such as "how many people have had access or went to those in-game locations and how many actions people take in those in-game locations, how many PokeStop spins to get items happened on that day and… what unique number of people went to that location."
"We don't go any further than that," he said.
There is a lot more there, from history of Niantic and people involved in creation of many of the things tied to those games.
Last edited:
