Director Oliver Stone, best known for his highly charged political movies, was speaking at panel for his upcoming movie Snowden at the Comic Con San Diego today, where he condemned Pokemon Go.
When asked what he thought of the phenomenon/mobile app, Stone called Nintendo’s newest game “A new level of invasion” and warned that it could lead to totalitarianism (via Variety).
“They are data mining every person in this room,” he said. “It’s what they call surveillance capitalism.”
The director says that Pokemon Go could create a “robot society.”
Many might be taken aback by his words, but the director’s worries are understandable due to the fact that the app provides Niantic (the developers of Pokemon Go) with full access to the user’s Google account The company recently stated that the company only collects basic Google profile information, specifically the user ID and email address.
Of course, Pokemon Go is hardly the Trojan horse Stone makes it out to be when companies like Google, Microsoft and Apple already collect a wide variety of personal information from their users, including search histories, GPS data, and viewing habits through regular means. You don’t need a game to do that.
