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Dec 2024
11m 24s

Did Pokémon GO catch us all in a scam?

LiSTNR
About this episode

It’s been eight years since Pokémon Go took the world by storm. But was the global phenomenon just a big data mining scam?

By the end of its launch year in 2016, over 200 million people had downloaded the game and today 90 million users are still trying to catch em’ all. But it's come to light that the game’s developers, Niantic, have been using its player’s data to train “the next frontier of AI”.

In this episode of The Briefing, Chris Spyrou chats with freelance games journalist Harry Kalogirou to find out how this happened, whether users are justified in feeling scammed and what this means for the future of AI.

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