My frustration of the Portal Scan feature which could be misused for privacy invasion
Last night when I went to an area for UPC in some part of Hong Kong, I met an Agent of opposite Faction. That Agent claimed that he was doing Portal Scanning. Yet, I saw that he seemed to directly use his phone to "scan" my face instead of scanning the real object of the Portal.
Though I did not direct argue with that Agent and continued my way to do some UPC, the behavior of that Agent had brought my concern. It seemed that he did not actually scan the real object, instead he was scanning other things to just earn an increment of Portal Scan number towards the Scout and Scout Controller medal.
I just cannot express my frustration that some Agents had misused the feature of "portal scanning" just scanning something irrelevant, or even, invasion of personal privacy. May I ask @NianticBrian, @NianticKK, @NianticCasey, @NianticThia, @halette or other members of moderator to review on how many Agents were scanning the object representing the Portals properly, instead of misusing the feature.
Thank you.
Comments
There would be a lot that don't scan it properly, I personally know that a number of local agents (if not most) have simply scanned while driving (even on freeways and doing 100km/h) or passing by on the train, it's really sad to be honest. Even the PoGo community seems to relish in scanning the ground just because of the rewards they get instead of actually contributing.
Niantic won't do anything to action the misuse. So hopefully Niantic's systems can automatically detect whether the portal has been scanned, or if its a random irrelevant scan.
u should have confronted him about scanning your face, thats not ok do to and abuse to not even scan what u supposed to seems very wrong....
It would be unwise to approach someone, especially you do not know if the person has a weapon. Think about your safety first and know your local laws concerning photographing a person in public. From there, you can determine your next course of action.
It's not a good idea to get into face-to-face confrontations with other agents in the field.
Report their behavior to NIA-OPS and do not engage further.
And how exactly are u supposed to prove that?
I would think Niantic could use some machine learning, and then have new scans go thru it, to reject fast scans of nothing, or scans that are only a face. That player shouldn't get credit - they should get a message saying the object wasn't found in their scan. This message could probably give more feedback, like: too fast, too slow, too much sky, looks like ground, face, etc. Then if an earnest nomination is rejected, we'd have a clue. Face would be tricky, because it could be a mural - but in that case, the waypoint picture/s would have a face.
This would be better if Niantic could show us examples of what they think are good - and let us see what we scanned.
That's why I didn't directly confront with that Agent on site.
Thank you and I wish NIA OPS could follow up in this matter.
Not that this condones low-quality scans, but in his last scanning FAQ Brian said that scanning the environment and objects around a Portal is also valid (though not preferred). This makes sense since they're building a model that just needs to distinguish where Object A ends and Object B begins, and it's probable that they've taken an "anything is better than nothing" approach to data collection. Even if a scan is of a face or sidewalk, they can still use it to train their model.
But again, that doesn't mean that we as a community should be encouraging low-quality scans and Niantic shouldn't be taking more measures to restrict them. I've never actually tried scanning from a moving vehicle, so does anyone else know if being speedlocked prevents scanning? If not, that's the first place to start.
That's the area around a portal, not the inside of a car or train as it passes by the portal quickly
Which is why I specifically called out not allowing scanning while speedlocked.