I was very active in the Ingress community around that time and while I appreciate their efforts, I don't think they were very successful in this regard. Using IITC (3rd party Ingress planning suite) we could track people's paths pretty well, to the point where you could easily see how others ran their routes and could intercept them if you wanted to say hi, or something more nefarious. I know at least one woman in the community changed their account because of a stalking problem.
I didn't totally mind the lack of location privacy since the game made it pretty clear you could run into people if you really wanted, but I wouldn't give them flying marks on the privacy issue. For Pokemon Go I'm sure they were far more careful, but Ingress really felt like the Wild West.
IITC was explicitly a violation of the ToS and Niantic made efforts to foil it and ban those identified as using it until player outrage made them give up. The nature of the game also was antithetical to the notion of privacy since you could predict player movements just on the basis of field layouts. Anyone playing in an area also quickly learned the approximate locations of home and work for other players solely on the basis of habitual game activity. I mean, the whole point of the game was geolocation, it seems odd to me that anyone would have some kind of problem with that for Ingress.
On the last point, Go has the same situation, where playing the game to its full extent requires giving up a lot of information to be publicly displayed.
Gym ownership in particular is needed to get in game coins (required fo basic things like extending pokemon storage), and will reveal a lot about someone’s life patterns to anyone willing to put efforts in knowing.
It gets worse with “friends”, it’s a very powerful leveling up mechanism, but gives the same insight in a more granular and extensive way.
I think the point of the comment is that by playing the game, you broadcast pretty sensitive data. It would be like if you were constantly uploading geotagged photos for everyone to see, and being surprised about people learning your location.
I really hate that this sounds like 'victim blaming', but if a threat vector for you is being stalked by a creep, and you don't want people to know where you are, then maybe voluntarily constantly broadcasting your location to the public isn't the best idea?
So privacy doesn't matter? And the police are the right solution for all invasions of your privacy? Do I get the local police involved if remote attackers use personal information to drain my bank account?
"The police" (local?) are a solution for certain kinds of problems, but that's it.
Consider restraining orders and all the victims these orders failed to protect. Far more effective is a large dog or other adult humans.
I didn't totally mind the lack of location privacy since the game made it pretty clear you could run into people if you really wanted, but I wouldn't give them flying marks on the privacy issue. For Pokemon Go I'm sure they were far more careful, but Ingress really felt like the Wild West.