Is Pokémon Go racist? How the app may be redlining communities of color

March 1, 2016

The popular smartphone game Pokemon Go was found to have a disproportionate concentration of augmented reality locations in predominantly white neighborhoods through a 2016 crowdsourced social media campaign. This raises concerns about digital redlining and the need for trustworthy AI governance.

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Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.601, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.1 — similarity 0.598, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 4.1 — similarity 0.588, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: niantic-labs
Alleged developer: niantic-labs
Alleged harmed parties: non-white-neighborhoods, communities-of-color

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/73

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

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