Location Spoofing in a Location-Based Game: A Case Study of Pokémon Go

The worldwide Pokémon Go fever has brought location spoofing into the public’s spotlight. Location spoofing is an intentional act to masquerade locational information to somewhere other than the actual location where a network communication takes place. In the realm of Cartography and GIScience, compared with well-studied spatial quality issues, our knowledge of location spoofing is still quite limited. By reviewing five frequently-conducted location spoofing techniques for Pokémon Go, this paper critically examines location spoofing as an emerging spatial data quality issue. To unveil the hidden motivation for location spoofing, we discuss the uneven spatial distribution of game rewards through mapping a large volunteered data set of worldwide Pokémons, and gaze at the major actors in the location-based game, including location spoofers, game designers, hackers and bots. Though the research scope of this paper lies in a location-based game per se, location spoofing widely exists in Internet applications and is not fundamentally different from other deceptive phenomena in the real world. We encourage cartographers and GIScientists to face this spoofing phenomena head-on in order to promote more effective and trustworthy uses of geospatial big data.