2017-10-20 15:36:07 - Erich Bacher (@thePrevaricator WI, US) Augmented reality gameplay is new and exciting territory. Yes, we all put our privacy on the line a bit every day that we play Ingress. But we also get to help define the cultural norms on using one another's location information. There has been some back-and-forth this week about whether x specific feature of #RIOT is technically within bounds of the Ingress TOS. Or claims that Niantic is aware of these TOS violations but tolerates them because they’ve been used to catch spoofers. If that's the case, Niantic can simply say so.

But so much of what is revealed in these screen shots is so far outside of the bounds of moral behavior. No one ends up in a Slack by mistake — you have to explicitly accept an invitation, and it is clear that one of the requirements for membership in this Slack was registration with your real agent name, spelling quirks and all. Joining the Brokers Guild was a conscious choice.

And once in, well, you'd see we can all see from these screenshots, in public channels inside that Slack. Guardian hit requests, complete with automated lists of which Brokers live nearby. The deals being brokered were guardian hits, not spoofer stings.

People helping each other set up bot access in other chat platforms to propagate scraped data to their local communities. Agents building portfolios of players whose every move they wanted to stalk.

Somehow, the hundreds of people in that Slack, even if they weren’t all participating, even if they joined with noble intentions, stayed silent about what they saw there.

That is destroying the soul of Ingress.