BiasMedium
Is Pokémon Go racist? How the app may be redlining communities of color
- Occurred
- Mar 1, 2016
- Published
- Jul 11, 2016
- Source
- AI Incident Database
Summary
Through a crowdsourcing social media campaign in 2016, several journalists and researchers demonstrated that augmented reality locations in the popular smartphone game Pokemon Go were more likely to be in white neighborhoods.
Developers
- Niantic Labs
Deployers
- Niantic Labs
Harmed parties
- non-white neighborhoods
- communities of color
Classification
Category confidence: 95%
Severity confidence: 90%
Rationale: The incident involves algorithmic bias in location data distribution affecting communities of color.
Classifier: Qwen/Qwen3.5-35B-A3B-FP8