Tag Archives: pokemon

Green group wants to use rare Pokemon to lure voters

by StewartReda2225 Posted on July 13, 2016

turning on the charmander

Green group wants to use rare Pokemon to lure voters

By on Jul 13, 2016Share

Pokemon Go — the augmented reality app that encourages people to get out in the real world and stare at their screens — has taken the nation by storm. It’s already surpassed Tinder in daily users, and players (or “trainers”) have appeared everywhere from the Holocaust Museum to Westboro Baptist Church. It’s huge. Now, one group is trying to harness the power of Pokemon for something bigger.

NextGen Climate Iowa, a climate change advocacy group, has announced events across the state for Pokemon enthusiasts. On Friday afternoon, NextGen hopes to attract young people to various locations by dropping lures for rare Pokemon — whatever that means. And, once the young people have been lured, NextGen hopes to register them to vote and educate them on climate issues.

“We were trying to figure out where the youth vote is here in Ames,” Jacob Martin regional field director for NextGen, told Iowa Starting Line. And they found it — walking around the city touching their phones and looking for Snorlax.

For Iowans who gotta catch ’em all, you can find the NextGen PokeStops in Ames, Des Moines, Iowa City, and Cedar Falls. And for non-Iowans, you can look forward to similar events coming up in New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Illinois.

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Green group wants to use rare Pokemon to lure voters

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Al Franken Is Worried About Pokemon Go

by Charlen62J Posted on July 12, 2016

Mother Jones

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Pokemon Go is all the internet cares about at the moment. Within the first week of the game hitting app stores in the United States, the augmented-reality game has been downloaded more than Tinder and is on pace to move past Twitter in active users, with an estimated 7.5 million downloads so far. It’s causing headaches at the Holocaust Museum and late-night gym battles outside the White House.

But one senator is worried that the game’s maker has gone too far in trying to catch all of its users’ information. On Tuesday afternoon, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) sent a letter to Niantic, the company behind Pokemon Go, posing a series of questions to clarify how the company will handle user information. “While this release is undoubtedly impressive,” Franken wrote, “I am concerned about the extent to which Niantic may be unnecessarily collecting, using, and sharing a wide range of users’ personal information without their appropriate consent.”

Media reports over the weekend highlighted that Niantic pushes users to sign up for the app by linking it to their Google account. And unlike many such services, for which a person signs up with a Google or Facebook account but only hands over limited information to the third-party app, Niantic’s privacy policy said it gathered access to a user’s full account—including the contents of his or her Gmail account—when the user signs up for Pokemon Go.

Niantic quickly responded to the news reports and said it would dial back the amount of information it can access from Google. But Franken wants to be extra sure that Pokemon Go is not exploiting its users’ privacy. “When done appropriately, the collection and use of personal information may enhance consumers’ augmented reality experience,” Franken continued, “but we must ensure that Americans’—especially children’s—very sensitive information is protected.”

Franken oversees a Senate subcommittee on privacy, technology, and the law and has used that perch to question companies like Uber on how they handle user information.

Read Franken’s full letter below:

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Al-Franken-Letter-On-Pokemon-Go (PDF)

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Al Franken Is Worried About Pokemon Go

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