XM pickup privacy issue.

XM pickup should be changed to per player.

It's theoretically possible to track players globally (beyond comms) while they are out of XM.

It's not a big a deal, as XM bars can be fully filled. But look at what happened in Minecraft just by being able to check which chunks were loaded: https://youtu.be/elqAh3GWRpA

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  • ArkFangArkFang ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited July 2021

    Not a bug, feature request. This is how Ingress has been from the beginning. In the past before Power Cubes it was used as a strategy to prevent attacks, and minimize them by absorbing any ground XM in the area if you knew someone was coming.


    nowadays, it’s also used to see if someone was possibly spoofing, based on the ‘trail’ of picked up XM. And this ‘tracking’ would only be if someone knew the exact area and could actively watch it in Remote View or if they’re at the location in-person. And ground XM replenished in about 10 minutes or less so it’s very unlikely to be very effective. Not to mention, if an Agent was just silently recharging while riding in a car, and didn’t do any visible actions, you don’t know who would be picking up ground XM anyway.


    and if you’re talking about extreme Scrapers (don’t even get me started on RIOT, Omnivore, and the lot) then changing it to per-device wouldn’t impact anything. If a Scraping tool is able to pick up ground-XM acquisition then it would continue to do so even if it was changed to per-device. The only way this could be ‘prevented’ would be if Niantic would stop that data exchange. And you know what that would entail? Disabling ground XM entirely. The only way to (easily) stop a third-party tool from collecting a specific data set is to stop collecting said data yourself.

  • Any tool that is using the Client API is a massive breach and cheating. So if it's happening, ban the users. Otherwise, human's looking at the use of XM is an important information tool.

    If you're worried, use a Hypercube beforehand.

  • @ArkFang That doesn’t work against spoofers. you have to close the app every time you change location. The only thing it could be used for is seeing if someone is farming while spoofing, but you wouldn’t know who.

  • Kevinsky86Kevinsky86 ✭✭✭
    edited July 2021

    This is only realisticly a point of discussion with home portals where your location can be more accurately highlighted and players will see more or less where you live in relation to the portal you've captured and subsequently deployed hack mods on, what can straight up give away your address depending on the sort of neighbourhood you live in.

    I'm not sure this game is for you if this worries you in any way. But the solution to this is fairly simple. Eat hypercubes or just not open your scanner at home.

  • People actually regularly use this on enemy anchors when they think someone might be travelling to one based on their other play. Many people who are hacking an anchor for keys, forget to keep their XM up, and you can tell which portal they're keyfarming by the missing XM.

    But that's 'old school' so probably no relevant to the "modern game". 😁

  • Kevinsky86Kevinsky86 ✭✭✭
    edited August 2021

    We usually actively recommend people to eat HC's when they are sent out to a PITA portal for this that or the other or wel known farm location or whatever. This is exactly why it shouldn't change because it's a element of play. A thing that the agent can mess up and somebody else can use to counter whatever would be going on.

    It keeps things interesting. It's like trying to be stealthy in snow. If you leave footprints somebody might find ya.

  • RTLQuietuSRTLQuietuS ✭✭✭
    edited August 2021

    You wouldn't need to disable 'ground xm' entirely, just make that data not shared with other people.


    >Any tool that is using the Client API is a massive breach and cheating


    I was largely talking in theory, but clearly this relies on accurately detecting those accounts.

    > This is only realisticly a point of discussion with home portals where your location can be more accurately highlighted and players will see more or less where you live

    This is a really good point, (I'm currently living in an apartment close enough to 2 portals, who is currently being harassed by 2 spoofing/name parody accounts)


    > I'm not sure this game is for you if this worries you in any way. But the solution to this is fairly simple. Eat hypercubes or just not open your scanner at home


    Eat dirt. This is equivalent to telling girls they shouldn't be in the workplace if they can't handle inappropriate comments. (Exaggerated so you can maybe understand my point?)

    Attempting to highlight the issue and drive change is not the same thing as the measures needed to take to avoid it.

  • KhatreKhatre ✭✭✭✭✭

    If you don't want peole to not know were you live don't play at home.

    Xm holes are part of ingress strategy

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