Pokémon Go - cute or dangerous?

Just a few days after its market launch millions of people are already playing the smartphone game Pokémon Go. Data and consumer protection experts warn about the dangers of the app, which sends players off hunting for the little Pokémon monsters all over the real world. Commentators aren't keen on the new game either.

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The Guardian (GB) /

Expensive merchandising in cute packaging

The mobile phone game Pokémon Go may come across as completely innocent but it will soon be misappropriated for commercial purposes, The Guardian warns:

“Google has recruited an army of pedestrians who will map the urban world for it. By designating some places as important to the game it can draw players there, and it is only a matter of time before it starts selling to businesses the ability to draw in potential customers like that. After that will come location-based advertising, where the phone in your hand will try to sell you things depending on your physical location, just as it presently does depending on your travels across the web. The ultimate goal of Pokémon Go is to make shopping the only game in town. If that happens, we will all be the poorer.”

La Vanguardia (ES) /

Pokémon Go should be banned from memorial sites

The Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC have banned Pokémon Go players from their premises, describing the game as 'extremely inappropriate' for these sensitive locations. Pilar Rahola welcomes this tough stance in La Vanguardia:

“The Holocaust must not be the scene of a game or an excuse for having fun. And the museums that commemorate the atrocity must be respected for what they are: temples of tragic memories, because millions of murdered hearts beat behind their walls. … When people go hunting for little monsters among gas chambers and death trains even death becomes unimportant. To trivialise is even worse than to deny because the arguments and the perversion of this denial are open to attack. But when evil is trivialised everything becomes more palatable and less tragic. And then the evil kills its victims all over again.”