During a panel for his new movie “Snowden” at the San-Diego Comic-Con this year, director Oliver Stone had some harsh words for Niantic and Nintendo’s latest Pokemon game, Pokemon GO.
“They are data mining every person in this room,” Stone said during the panel. “It’s what they call surveillance capitalism.”
He is right in some way: the application was having issues originally with Google account access on iOS devices, granting the app access to all of people’s Google profile, rather than just the basics that the app needed. Niantic had this to say on the issue:
“We recently discovered that the Pokémon GO account creation process on iOS erroneously requests full access permission for the user’s Google account,” Niantic said in a statement. “However, Pokémon GO only accesses basic Google profile information (specifically, your User ID and email address) and no other Google account information is or has been accessed or collected.”
While the issue was fixed pretty quickly, Stone still had heavy-handed criticism of the app, stating that it’s helping usher in a “robot society,” as well as being a “new level of invasion.”
Zachary Quinto, who was also at the panel for Snowden for his role as Glenn Greenwald, had this to say about the app:
“People need to pursue what makes them happy, what makes me happy is looking up at people and putting down my screen for at least some part of the day.”