These requirements suggest that Niantic would conduct its operations in ways that establish substantial surplus supply chains aimed at scale and scope. Indeed, the company's “surveillance policy” signals its demand for behavioral data in excess of what is reasonable for effective game operations. Just six days after the game's release in July 2016, BuzzFeed reporter Joseph Bernstein advised Pokémon users to check how much data the app was collecting from their phones. According to his analysis, “Like most apps that work with the GPS in your smartphone, Pokémon Go can tell a lot of things about you based on your movement as you play: where you go, when you went there, how you got there, how long you stayed, and who else was there. And, like many developers who build those apps, Niantic keeps that information.” Whereas other location-based apps might collect similar data, Bernstein concluded that “Pokémon Go's incredibly granular, block-by-block map data, combined with its surging popularity, may soon make it one of, if not the most, detailed location-based social graphs ever compiled.”

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 996