Foto of Enviroment for spoofer-recognition
I think, Niantic has its algorithms to detect spoofing, but they must be sure not to ban anybody wrong.
My Idea is easy:
If someone wants to battle in a gym,
this person is forced to make any foto of enviroment, this foto is sent to niantic. Niantic can now compare fotos with some kind of deep-mind-recognition and after a short time, they know the enviroment of each gym. If they then get a photo that
(1) does not match to enviroment or
(2) is identical to any photo already sent,
they can forbid that user to battle in the specific gym. If one user fails significantly more often than others and shows other typical signs of a spoofer, that player could be banned.
I would be glad to read your thoughts to this idea.
Answers
Seems like a huge amount of work for all that photo recognition and data storage.
True. As they sit on millions of dollars, they could do it anyway.
Also seems like someone could just go take a bunch of pictures of the gyms in the area ahead of
time.
The photos had to be taken with the pkm-app itself in real time to get this problem solved. PKM-go already has access to the camera for augmented-reality-mode.
Great that you are posting diff ideas to combat spoofing, but there are some problems with what you've proposed.
- What if it's at night and the gym is at a poorly lit area? Then the photo taken might not "match" or be recognized by the game. So even legit gamers wi be penalized. There are many gyms where I live that are up in the mountains. Very low to zero lights.
- How "not identical" can the photos be? After awhile, people will start posting images online or just use Google street view to get the photo they need. Trim the photo edges here and there. Alter some colors, add in some random shapes and it's not identical anymore.
- Increase in data usage and drain in battery life. The game already causes a huge drain in battery. Any increase in drain would be horrible. Sending photos uses up data for your cellular plan. Since they took away unlimited data in a lot of countries' cellular service, increase in data storage isn't a good thing. Yes, I can agree that not everyone battles and battles aren't done 50 times a day, but still.
What if it's at night and the gym is at a poorly lit area?
Photo-verification could occur only sometimes (and more to accounts, that are suspect for some reason anyway), it would maybe sometimes be a penalty, as a legal player could not verify and not battle - if three facts come together - suspect for some reason, night, and bad enlightened - i think, if it helps to stop spoofers, sometimes not to be able to battle at night would be ok.
How "not identical" can the photos be? After awhile, people will start posting images online or just use Google street view to get the photo they need. Trim the photo edges here and there. Alter some colors, add in some random shapes and it's not identical anymore.
Yes, this would be a challenge for both, niantic and the spoofers. Maybe niantic can manage to be a step ahead - as they are with some poke-maps.
Increase in data usage and drain in battery life. The game already causes a huge drain in battery. Any increase in drain would be horrible. Sending photos uses up data for your cellular plan.
Realistic - how many gyms do you battle a day? Let it be 10, this would be many. Photos could be reduced to 640x480 with some jpeg-reduction, so 100kb per picture should be sufficient. Maybe, this would raise your data-volume caused by PK-Go by 10%.
Battery drain for 10 photos is harmless, unless you use flash-light.
I do not see a real killer for my idea - but maybe it needs lots of rework.
Thanks for your analysis.
