I could you tell some stories... There's several recorded deaths (the one I can recall without looking it up involved drowning trying to reach a lighthouse). Players play whilst driving regularly. Several local disagreements almost progressed to physical fights.
There's a global network of data-scrapers on both teams that log all player activity for strategic reasons. Or maybe "just because they can". That's timestamped location data for every interaction with the game. (as far as I know this isn't possible with Pokemon Go. Being aimed at kids it's much more locked down and safe-guarding aware)
On the plus side - many healthy friendships were formed and even a couple of long-term relationships. I still occasionally meet up with my old chums.
Yes, I've experienced everything you've mentioned since the beta days of Ingress.
On a more positive note... after finally hiring data scientists and mobile device hackers, Niantic have been progressively banning Ingress accounts suspected of scraping and/or automating the gathering of resources and recharging of portals. The impact in my area, southern California, changed longstanding faction dominated territories into fragmented pockets that either faction can now control. Suspected "automated" supply chains are now broken and rule changes to Quantum capsules resulted in the slowing down of attacks and lowered volume/frequency of those beneficiaries.
How much of that fragmentation simply come from legit players stop playing Ingress? Over here the community notably shrank and people don't defend their home base anymore as strong (even in legit ways)
Gotta tell you, this whole thing reads as seriously creepy. Who's to say that intelligence orgs or other interested parties wouldn't create or piggyback on things like this for a source of high granularity location data? Even just to resell?
In the case of games where you use the camera, wouldn't someone maybe also want to use (at least snapshots of) the video feed? Like, on the benign side you could use it to update Google Street View, but on the more malicious side it's easy to imagine putting some rare Pokemon down somewhere and baiting someone off in order to get them to take pictures of specific things for you without needing an agent on the ground to go and do it.
I can't imagine running a game like this on my hardware or allowing my kids to do so. You've gotta be a bit naive to just assume it's completely innocent.
If I recall correctly, Strava had precisely this unintended consequence -- if you saw someone using the app to run laps in the middle of nowhere, it was likely a military base.
>Who's to say that intelligence orgs or other interested parties wouldn't create or piggyback on things like this for a source of high granularity location data?
How is this sort of location data useful? Sure, my day to day walking around is useful, but like parent said above, data is only recorded when you're actively playing the game. So you'd get a bunch of location data of... people going to the places the game wants them to go. You can't really do anything with that.
See the activity heat map about halfway down the front page? That is (or could be) a single person's play pattern. It is ludicrously easy to figure out where the average player works, if they play at work. It's often easy to figure out where they live. There are enough points of interest in any urban area so that game activity tracks where you typically go, not just where the game wants you to go.
And that site is using a fairly crude, incomplete method for scraping. It doesn't capture everything by any means.
It's pretty easy to do something with that info. Let's say there's a pokestop on a military installation, then most visitors are likely to be military personnel, and now we have a list of phones of military personnel. What's more, we can learn which troops are deployed to which bases, and patterns about how troops get redeployed to different bases.
How is this useful? Well, it's well known that Ft. Meade in the US is an NSA outpost. If troops from Ft. Meade regularly get transferred to Camp Pendleton (chosen arbitrarily), then we can infer that there's likely to be a lot of SIGINT (electronic spying) activity at Camp Pendelton. For a smaller installation (say a covert safe house abroad), these sorts of clues may be the first signs that foreign intelligence agencies can use to detect that these bases even exist.
ok.. and if one weren't military personnel? The original comment seemed to be raising some kind of unspecified fear about this in general, not just for a small segment of the population who frankly should know better.
Well, one could get unsuspecting users to take pictures around all kinds of facilities and such. Consider too that if you have multiple databases of this sort, you can draw a lot of inferences based on who is usually around whom.
You still haven’t provided a reason why this is a bad thing. Ok, so there are unsuspecting users taking photos of the local YMCA facilities. What you’re talking about is similar to the social graph but on a much smaller scale. The only reasonable use is for advertising. The world’s not going to end.
Foreign intelligence services are likely just as interested in hiring FAANG employees as they are soldiers. A compromised Googler could get them lots of access.
Yeah but a phone is also a device collecting tons of useful metadata - nearby towers,wifi routers, bt devices and even the most secured iPhones can be turned leaky with enough access.
Simply get into an iPhone of a known location based app gamer and then add a pokestop to a location. Even if the gamer gets picked up it won't be too suspicious since they'll have a history of going to lots of random locations. Even if the hack is detected by a suspicious organization, the phone will have transmitted the info out by the time they detect the hack.
This is just one poorly thought out scenario, there are lots of things you can do with phones nowadays - use them as collection tools, relays etc
> Sure, my day to day walking around is useful, but like parent said above, data is only recorded when you're actively playing the game. So you'd get a bunch of location data of... people going to the places the game wants them to go. You can't really do anything with that.
Of course you can. You can for instance see where people can't go because the area is restricted.
Pokémon go has an option to track your location when the app is in the background, even though that location is almost never useful. This is actually a regression from a previous version, which synced with Apple’s health APIs to track steps without tracking location. It’s not hard to guess why they removed that feature.
I would imagine most players are recording data at all times - the game harasses you nearly nonstop, every time you launch, attempt to catch, randomly walking around to enable "adventure sync", which is "always location".
As a fellow ex-Ingresser, I think there are some truly fascinating stories that will eventually be lost about all the effort that has gone into that game globally. I’ve seen heroic feats of software engineering, physical effort and project management, all in the name of some mobile game that’s a much bigger game of capture the flag.
Losing G+ really hurt here, since that was the primary community tool. I didn't save as much as I wanted to. Luckily there are some epic stories in Google Docs. Actually...
I mean, almost any game that’s popular enough ends up having these kinds of crazy stories. If you think what Ingress players do is crazy, you should see what EVE Online players get up to...
It's been so long since I played, obviously, I can't remember all the terminology. I had another green player destroy my base link (whatever it was called - my oldest link) because it was in his way. He could have reached out to me and I might have given him the okay. So I was real mature about it, I caused a scene in the world chat and rage-quit.
The way the base in Halifax handled it is a perfect example for how these types of things should be approached:
1. Remove the threat (PokeStop) where it is a security risk.
2. Harness the attention for organizational benefit where possible (Add PokeStop to increase museum attendance)
Best of all, this approach stems from some good life/business advice from Rear Admiral Newton, "Life and work are best accomplished if there is good fun, health and friendship."
>2. Harness the attention for organizational benefit where possible (Add PokeStop to increase museum attendance)
i wonder (have never played myself) whether the Pokemons can be customized according to location - a restaurant owner would pay for the Pokemons enjoying and cheering the food there while the Pokemons in the military settings like that museum would ride a tank or a plane or shoot some weaponry military ads style.
They're usually customized by weather/continent/time of the year rather than by specific location.
The closest I've heard of was when the game just came out. There's an item in-game called lures that attract Pokemons to a specific stop. Many restaurant owners were trying to attract customers by consistently buying and applying them, so people could continue to play while eating.
They cost 1$ for like 30 minutes or something like that.
Some categories are blocked, like daycare and schools. They'll also prevent anything from showing up, pokemon included, from areas that don't have recognized roads or paths. There is a park near my house that has a paved path through the woods that doesn't show up in the pokemon go app, so nothing appears there because the game doesn't want to encourage you to wander through the woods.
Not sure about schools and daycares. My children’s school and daycare is a gym and a poke stop respectively. And there are several other daycares here in the area which are gyms.
the locations are identical to the ones users submitted for ingress, the previous game niantic did.
for that you didn't need much vetting and because the popularity was low nobody cared so much. most likely some servicemen (servicepersons?) submitted the spots.
No, they're (mostly) user-submitted and user-approved. In theory new locations on military bases aren't allowed as of a couple of years ago, but a few slip through the process. And, inconsistently, old ones aren't removed.
They were seeded from locations used in a previous AR game called Ingress, however since (iirc) Ingress locations were user-submitted it lead to PokeGo’s landmarks sometimes being odd or awkwards.
It's cool to see how the game took the world by storm in such a short time. The "out-group" - including military personnel - was left completely in the dark as to what all kids seemed to know about: Pokemon, Gyms and Stops.
> "Plse advise the Commissionaires that apparently Fort Frontenac is both a PokeGym and a PokeStop. I will be completely honest in that I have not idea what that is," wrote Maj. Jeff Monaghan at CFB Kingston.
From what I remember of age distribution of players, at least the ones I knew at work, the Major quoted in the article is on the cusp of being too old to have experienced pokemon as a kid whereas the front line personnel are in the target age for the game and app. I'm far too old for pokemon; the concept was invented right about the time I graduated college. The Major is probably about a decade younger than I am, plus or minus speed of promotion in the Canadian forces.
I suspect there was a lot of trolling the upper echelons by lower level personnel claiming they've never heard of any pokey-man and similar. That's how it would have rolled when I was in the Army. Privates always create their own fun. The military guy who convinced his boss to let him explore the base to find more pokemon for himself, err, I mean, strictly for research purposes, is a truly epic stereotypical military story.
> The game's premise seems to be going to the 'PokeStops/Gyms' to collect 'Pokemon's' (we should almost hire a 12-year-old to help us out with this)
And I loved how the CFB Halifax made a recommendation that apparently (from my very limited understanding of Pokémon GO) requires getting some of their people to play the game to upgrade the stops at the museum :D
I’m pretty sure you can’t upgrade locations from within the game (or at least could not at the time the locations were landmarks seeded from Ingress), I’d guess the recommendations were for contact to niantic.
Clash Royale is popular? Sampling my entire social sphere: around where I live, everyone and their dog plays or at least briefly played Pokemon Go. Clash Royale is a title I know only from the constant advertising spam on Facebook; I haven't seen a single person playing it ever.
I know it's just a local sample, but for something supposedly more popular than Pokemon Go, I'd expect to encounter at least one player.
pokemon go is a much more "visible" game. if you have any idea how the game works, it's really obvious when you see people playing it irl. it's hard to notice people playing clash royale unless you look at their screen or hear them talking about specific cards from the game. when I was waiting for a flight at the airport recently, almost all the kids seemed to be playing clash royale.
anecdotally, I don't notice clash royale being as popular with adults as pokemon go. it may be true that it's not very popular in your world, if you don't spend a lot of time around children/teenagers. in my bubble, I hardly ever see people playing pokemon go anymore.
The game was insanely popular for the few weeks immediately following launch in 2016. It is entirely possible that Clash had more players, but they weren't all outside walking around while looking at their phones in places they'd never visited before.
>At least three military police officers (at CFB Comox in British Columbia, CFB Petawawa and CFB Kingston) were assigned an unusual task: wander around their bases, smartphones and notepads in hand, searching for virtual Pokemon infrastructure.
there is a comedy gold here. Cleaning the base from Pokemon infestation before an inspecting visit by General. The Major pondering whether he should salute to the Pokemon in General insignia. Soldiers getting to/from AWOL presenting themselves as undercover secret Pokemons to the drunk clueless Major on duty (my imagination naturally drifts to the specifics of the military i'd known from my childhood, ie. USSR/Russia) - they disappear AR-style when the Major looks at them through the phone.
I hope these games increase people's awareness of property ownership (both public and private) and make them pause to give thought to the question of how and why things are and what normal people are allowed and disallowed from doing and why.
Imagine if Pokemon go used the elevation data from gps. It's just lat long. People would be climbing trees, using prybars to open the locked roof access doors of tall office buildings, etc.
GPS provided elevation data is bad, like really really bad. Often tens of meters out of sync. Unlikely this would work well in practice without additional location data sources (barometer, camera based tracking, etc.).
GPS elevation data on a modern device with a sufficiently good view of the sky is often, but by no means guaranteed, to be a lot better than that. On a really cheap smartphone with GPS+GLONASS receive ability you can regularly see 12 to 14 satellites. The more satellites, the better the Z axis precision.
Anecdotally, when standing next to FCC licensed radio systems on roofs, which are supposed to have accurate license data in their database entries for height MSL and AGL, I have seen elevation data from my late-2019 vintage smartphone just as accurate as on a $5000 surveying GPS.
Yes, this is why most backcountry navigation apps don't display GPS elevation to the user, instead they use the lat/long to look up the position on a topographical map and report that elevation instead. In very steep terrain, it's always a good idea to employ a conventional (barometric) altimeter.
Genuinely curious - what would you need moment by moment readings for? My experience with back country camping is the Rockies, so I've never been at any sort of altitude danger zone, and it's usually pretty binary - you're either on top of the mountain or still not. For something like a GPS watch I'd just want to look back on it later to be able to review my route, but I can't see myself taking barometric measurements for accuracy.
In steep terrain, elevation is a great way to find your location. Suppose I know that I'm on a certain lateral feature - a ridge, canyon, or watercourse. By knowing my precise elevation, I can determine my exact location. This helps me navigate as well as quickly guesstimate my current pace / progress. If I know I will spend all day ascending gradually on a valley glacier from 4000 m to 5000 m, in 1 second I can check my altimeter and know how far I've come when a handheld GPS will spend 30 seconds trying to get a fix.
If someone is trying to state the location of, for instance, a good bivy site on a rock climbing route, "1890 m on the SE ridge" is equally as precise as the GPS coordinates, but much more descriptive.
> Prior to founding Niantic Labs, Hanke was the CEO of mapping company Keyhole, Inc. through funding from the CIA’s venture capital branch, In-Q-Tel in 2001. Keyhole was later bought by Google in 2004.
> The In-Q-Tel website clearly states its mission on the front page, so there is no doubt as to what interests the company serves:
> IQT identifies, adapts, and delivers innovative technology solutions to support the missions of the Central Intelligence Agency and broader U.S. Intelligence Community.
Lol. This sort of thing is nothing new. Canada, and many other countries, don't operate their bases like the US. There isn't razorwire and men patrolling the perimeter with guns. Often, if you don't notice the signs, you can drive directly onto a base unchallenged. Only the areas with sensitive stuff are behind 24/7 guards. Usually the first thing a wayward driver notices are the signs saying 'marching troops have right of way'. What is funny is seeing people who have made that wrong turn freak out thinking they have done something wrong. Admittedly, sharing the road with an armed platoon can be a bit intimidating but at most you will get an escort back to the public road. So it is no surprise that pokemon classified such bases as public areas.
The upside of this security posture is that to get eyes on the guarded perimeter you have to first enter the open area of the base, somewhere where unusual activity will be noticed.
I reminds me a bit of Ingress players who created portals at secure facilities so that the other faction could not capture them.
I do wonder though if someone might weaponize this. Being able to "generate a crowd" at a particular location all with a plausible excuse for being there would make accessing some places surreptitiously much easier.
Mapping of roads and paths in areas of interest at least as a collateral effect. Maybe including some features that a satellite can't see well (tunnels, paths on forested areas, ect).
I dont really get how people were able to just walk into military bases. Shouldn't they have fences? And if there's no fence, isn't it just public land that it's OK to walk on?
In the western US, you will find several remote military bases that include ground and air live-fire ranges that are un-fenced. There are usually signs though. (Some) military bases are very large, making it impractical to maintain complete fencing around them.
>And if there's no fence, isn't it just public land that it's OK to walk on?
Exactly. The US uses shear size as a boundary to entry into the bases. I learned this after reading about the German family who perished in Death Valley and their perilous walk to find help at the nearby military base which proved fruitless. They were looking for a fence and guard towers not realizing they were walking further from help.
> > And if there's no fence, isn't it just public land that it's OK to walk on?
> Why would it be?
This isn't the culture in the US, but in some parts of the world, the default assumption is that land is accessible unless it's fenced or otherwise marked. There are some politeness norms like not walking right up to someone's house in the woods, but generally in i.e. Norway, if it's outside, you're probably allowed to be there.
The culture in the US seems to come from capitalism being such a part of our culture. Every resource, including land, is viewed as a commodity. Even many of our publicly-owned land which is ostensibly intended for public use, such as state and national parks, has entry fees.
> This isn't the culture in the US, but in some parts of the world, the default assumption is that land is accessible unless it's fenced or otherwise marked.
I don't think there is any doubt that these military bases were marked.
> The culture in the US seems to come from capitalism being such a part of our culture. Every resource, including land, is viewed as a commodity. Even many of our publicly-owned land which is ostensibly intended for public use, such as state and national parks, has entry fees.
It costs money to maintain public lands like national parks. The neanderthals who don't understand Leave No Trace principles cause massive amounts of damage that needs to be prevented, policed, and repaired. Chores like trail maintenance, habitat restoration, wildlife studies, trash removal, toilet upkeep, etc. etc, all need to be done to keep the parks as close as possible to wild, so that the next generation can enjoy it. Entry fees fund the conservation of these public lands.
Yes, I'm well aware. I've done some of that work with my own hands. I think you're assuming that I don't think that money is worth it, but on the contrary, I wish the US would invest more money in public land.
It costs money to maintain public land, but that's not any less true in the other countries I'm talking about. The difference is that that cost is more likely to come from national budgets, rather than from fees, which is better in a lot of ways: it's more transparent, and is a progressive rather than regressive tax, is better for tourism, etc.
Also note that a lot of the non-fenced land in i.e. Norway isn't public land, it's private land, and it's still accessible to the public due to cultural norms. This may seem weird that there's a social expectation that people will open their private property to public use, but the flip side is that there's little cultural opposition to government helping maintain property. Many hiking shelters, for example, are on private property, but built and maintained by the government.
Criminal trespass does not generally require a fence or sign in most US states (they say you have greater legal protection if you do post a sign or make a fence, but it's not required - IANAL, I just read the internet :)). https://www.bestofsigns.com/blog/no-trespassing-signs-laws-w...
...and some states such as my own do not embrace the concept of BLM managing public land the way California does as a unique state; in some states most land is generally considered private and legally owned by (someone or something). https://www.wideopenspaces.com/public-land-texas-brief-histo... and has corresponding state-specific criminal trespass laws. Pulling from another comment comparing Norway culture, roughly 2.5x(?) Norways can fit inside Texas.
People were walking into non-restricted areas of the military bases that were open to the public. None of the incidents discussed in the article were in restricted areas of the bases. That's not to say they didn't fall under the security of the base, so it would be reasonable for the commissionaires tasked with base security to investigate suspicious activity even in non-restricted areas.
E.g. Fort Fontenac, one of the bases named, is the site of a historic battle and so has cultural interest open to the public. But it also has official Canadian Forces business conducted on site. Similarly some of the CFBs have museums etc and are generally open to the public.
Heh. When I was younger, I was lost and distracted (with a paper map, pre-9/11) while driving, and ended up inside CFB Borden (one of the military bases mentioned in the article) without realizing it, by absent-mindedly following traffic. I wonder if someone distracted by Pokemon on their phone could make the same mistake today.
Pre 9/11 was almost 20 years ago. Since then most American military installations have controlled access, meaning a DOD id card or something similar (and vehicle decals).
It’s possible people might wander (especially on Army posts) onto ranges out in the sticks, but the actual garrison area will be off limits to the public (esp in the Navy and Air Force). A quick glance at Google Maps for some Canadian military installations shows them without gate guards and open to the public.
Can concur with a personal anecdote. Got lost a few years ago on my motorcycle and was utterly confused when I passed the open gate into the grounds not aware that it was even a military base until I saw all the following signage.
In Canada, the concept is more "Crown Land" than "public land".
I don't know the answer to your question, but my instincts pose it in the negative sense: Why would there be a right to be on the Queen's land without permission?
Seems like a fairly straightforward, good, solution would be for countries to update legislation such that restricted airspaces apply to augmented reality too.
Then it would be required of Niantic (rather than its cooperation hoped for) to ensure none were in such areas.
You've just made it really easy to get a complete map of all sensitive locations... one hopes the nation's enemies aren't clever enough to publish an app.
First, I'm assuming there is actually a reason to limit the public's wandering through military bases. If that's the case, ISTM that safety only requires the public stay out of probably-already-fenced actually-dangerous areas. Keeping the public out of all lands must be for some less tangible reason like "national security".
People can walk on unfenced land whether or not they have an AR app. If it's important that they not walk there, put up some signs or increase patrols or whatever. Those are local solutions that aren't easily aggregated by a single app developer seeking all locations with "national security" connections.
Airspace may be restricted for any number of reasons, especially safety. Also, we can't build fences in the air. So, airspace restriction for reasons of "national security" can hide among all the other airspace restrictions. On the ground, that isn't the case.
My suggestion was to make all airspace restriction apply to AR, so I don't understand why you think airspace restrictions are fine, but my suggestion leaks information compromising national security?
> It took more than three years for the Department of National Defence (DND) to provide the documents requested by CBC News.
> [...] "Recognizing that backlog files require more attention, DND recently created a new team in the Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) Directorate as part of a Backlog Reduction Initiative. This team has been assigned the task of working solely on backlog files so that the other processing teams can concentrate on ensuring newer files do not go late," she said.
LOL, what a waste of resources.
Edit: I don't get why I'm being downvoted. These things do have a cost. FOIA requests are not free. FOIA requests can be frivolous. Here we have one branch of the Canadian government (the CBC) getting another branch of the Canadian government (the military) to spend time collecting information, scanning documents, reviewing everything for security... all so that Brett can write a lame "quirky" story about a video game that's three years old at this point. For what? Clicks? Ad revenue? It's obviously pure waste. No wonder they had to create a special team to deal with the backlog, when the government itself files bullshit requests against itself.
I don't know, maybe the Canadian military has nothing better to do. Maybe Canada's government journalists have nothing more pressing to look into with respect to the military. I guess it's possible. It still leaves you wondering what the Canadian public is paying them for.
BTW, just a few days ago there was an article about how America used to be able to complete large engineering projects quickly and cheaply, and now they can't. Some were pointing out that perhaps the cumulative cost of all the new systems we built on top since then has something to do with it (whether they are public systems due to regulation or private systems due to litigation). Well, maybe it's because our governments keep making laws that say "do this within 60 days or else", and the cost remains forever unexamined.
Then let me at least point out that this is a clear instance of pure waste. And yes, a certain level of frivolous requests probably needs to be tolerated for the system to work at all. But when it's the _government_ creating waste _for itself_ to write a Buzzfeed-tier piece of shit article because it's all magic free government money, all I can say is: dear Brett, you're not a stalwart guard-dog of democracy just because your job title has "journalist" in it. You need to actually think about what you're doing and try to do something useful with your government paycheck.
* FOIA is American, ATIP is Canadian. Anyhow, of course they aren't "free", no one said they were. It's (at best) incoherent to make straw-man arguments against the wrong thing...
* Just because there are worse things in the world doesn't mean we can't consider lesser ones. It's not like journalists are all only ever allowed to write about whatever you consider to be the single most pressing topic at the time.
* Just because this article doesn't interest you, personally (it obviously interests other HNers, considering it's on the front page) doesn't mean that it's a "Buzzfeed-tier piece of shit article".
* Not all government spending is bad, as you seem to imply, and some oversight is absolutely necessary to prevent corruption.
* This ATIP request resulted in an interesting article that covered Canadian culture, geo-location games and trespassing issues, the health of the ATIP program, as well as humourous anecdotes on how military policy discovered and handled the issue of PokemonGo.
I can think of a couple of reasons why you are being down voted:
1. The CBC operates at arms length (similar to the BBC) and is not "one branch of the Canadian government".
2. The point of a FOIA request is that they are SUPPOSED to find nothing. The FOIA "threat" is what keeps the government in line, it's not a "waste of time". That the reporter found nothing and went on to write a fluff piece is the system working as designed.
Perhaps one small point; how Canada handled this differently to say, perhaps the US might, makes this worth something. Also FOIA requests are generally processed only when the cost and resource required are "reasonable". At least here in the UK that's the case.
You're getting down voted for making a whole lot of assumptions that aren't valid.
Pure waste? Give me a break.. I guess it's foreign to you that if the public asks the government something in Canada, they better serve us the citizens, because we're who the government serves, not the other way around.
And when something like this happens, Canadian's aren't brainwashed and go straight for the gun as an option. They actually use common sense to adjust to situations unlike those in our southern border.
I find it hilarious that you would rather have work undone and marked unimportant than actually try and serve the public.
Consider living abroad, it'll cleanse your American brainwashing.
FOIA requests can be frivolous, but the actions of government can be both frivolous and extremely harmful. Transparency is a fundamental tool of preventing government from being frivolous and extremely harmful. Fielding FOIA requests is going to have some wasted effort due to frivolous requests, but that's an unavoidable side effect of effective transparency in government, which is fundamentally, critically important.
If anything, I'd rather see a policy of default-open rather than default-closed--if people want to classify information they should need to provide a justification for why it needs to be classified, not the other way around.
I could you tell some stories... There's several recorded deaths (the one I can recall without looking it up involved drowning trying to reach a lighthouse). Players play whilst driving regularly. Several local disagreements almost progressed to physical fights.
There's a global network of data-scrapers on both teams that log all player activity for strategic reasons. Or maybe "just because they can". That's timestamped location data for every interaction with the game. (as far as I know this isn't possible with Pokemon Go. Being aimed at kids it's much more locked down and safe-guarding aware)
On the plus side - many healthy friendships were formed and even a couple of long-term relationships. I still occasionally meet up with my old chums.