Pokemon Go and the Police

To all my readers who don't care at all about games or cell phones, read this post anyways, it isn't about a game or cell phones, it is about manipulating you and using the newest technologies to do it.

"Pokémon Go" is a virtual reality game, that is to say that you use your phone's camera to see the world around you and objects are inserted into your view that do not actually exist in real life. Imagine looking in your mirror and seeing a moving cartoon along with you, just like in the movie "Mary Poppins". That is how Pokémon Go works and depending on where you are you will see different characters.

Lets use Disney characters for an example. Imagine that when you are at Disneyland you take out your phone and snap a picture of the Haunted Mansion; but, when you look through the camera you see all the ghosts and the mansion together. Trust me, if Disney has noticed the popularity of Pokémon Go they will be working on this now.

So here is a phone application that rewards you with different pictures depending on where you go. Imagine if you could only get a picture of the original Mickey Mouse at the original Disneyland and that Disney World was the only place you could snap the newest version of Mickey, people in love with the mouse would want to go to both places. Think about the advertising and marketing usages. Restaurants will want to pay to have special Pokémons that can only be found at their businesses. Taco Bell could be the only place where you can find a Star Wars character as part of their newest promotion which is linked to the new Star Wars movie, this is what is coming.

Dear readers, if you understand the technology I have explained then trust me, even though it is not being discussed today, the usages I am saying will come in the future. No idea exists in one mind, it exists as a possibility and others will arrive at the same conclusion. It is vanity and foolishness to think that if the person who first came up with the wheel had died at birth that someone else would not have come up with it.

This post is not about any of that. Assume that we now have a reason to incentivize people to take pictures of everything around them, all day so that they can collect cookies or dollars or whatever reward you can imagine. That is what Pokemon Go is. Immediately upon it's release I told one of my children that we would start seeing news reports about how criminals were caught because of people using Pokémon Go well it has only been about two weeks since the games release and the reports are now on line.

YouTube - IGN - We Spent 30 Minutes with Pokemon Go.  A good general explanation by a tech organization on what the game is. Watch it and know what your kids and others are using and why they have their phones out all the time now.

Daily Mail - Gotta catch 'em all! Police ask Pokemon Go players to help track down a thief who broke into a Tesco garage near to a game checkpoint used for topping up Pokeballs. So here is step one, the Police know what Pokémon Go is and that people are taking pictures where these players go to take pictures and want access to those pictures to catch criminals. Right now the police will take all cameras that are at crime scenes. After 9-11 the government took the surveillance films from private businesses at all of the crash scenes. They now have an excuse to take the phone from everyone who was at a crime scene and examine all the pictures on it if you use this virtual tech.

Huffington Post - Police Bet On Rare ‘Pokemon Go’ Character To Catch Fugitives. 

MSN - Variety - Oliver Stone Calls Pokemon Go a ‘New Level of Invasion’ at Comic-Con.  The article itself is not very good as it ignores what Stone was complaining about and focus's on a different problem with the game that has since been solved. The real issue is about constant surveillance of all of us.