"Niantic made a statement about the ingress cheating ring. Take note, these statements, and future actions could effect Pokemon Go"

#PokemonGO: TLDR: Highly connected cheaters caught in Ingress, Niantic is taking action, Pokemon Go might see some changes because of it.Recently there was a huge leak of a massive data mining and scraping tool in ingress called the Brokers Guild, and all the primary users were outed. There was a decent amount of discussion here, on the pokemon go sub, and on the ingress sub, so feel free to look it up if you were not aware.What is important to note is that high level contacts in the game were implicated in the use of this tool, some that were hand picked by Niantic to be points of contact, pr guys, "ambassadors" to the game.In their official statement they said these players are being removed from these programs, and that they are looking at ways to protect themselves in the future.Lets be honest, while the extent of this cheating ring was way more personally invasive than anything I have seen on Pokemon GO, the methods they used to obtain much of the data used is no different than scanners and gym mappers. Spawn locations, gym details, and basically anything you see on the radar is protected information.Scanners use bots to scrape this information for the most part, which is something their statement address directly for Ingress.More than that, they have shown they are willing to remove trusted users who are implicated in the use of these tools.In the early days of Pokemon Go, Niantic took a very hard stance against scanners, and while I have seen no official change in stance from them on the topic, they seem to basically ignore all the small ones still in use.As Pokemon Go is their primary revenue source now, I expect most, if not all changes to ingress to reflect on Pokemon Go, because they share the same databases, and any effort to protect that database will by its nature affect both games.I would personally advise people to dissociate with users and groups who use scanners or other cheating methods going forward.Niantic stated that "We are evaluating all options to protect our users, our game, and our rights and will take further action where appropriate." I wont speculate on what those actions might be, but there are lots of ways to address it, and some could directly effect implicated individuals who create these tools for either game.I would watch for future developments on this topic even if you don't play Ingress, because honestly, I dont see how it wont effect us.Any how, play safe trainers, play fair, and have fun doing what we do. via /r/TheSilphRoad http://ift.tt/2gJPX12