Wayfarer Submission Abuse
iHellrai5er-PGO
Posts: 110 ✭✭✭
I am writing this post to bring the attention of Niantic officials to a possible issue at hand which is causing a lot of issues in the community.
There is someone who is reusing pictures of wayspots and submitting it in other locations. Since the nominations are valid in the first look, people who review it will give thumbs up and it gets accepted. So far we have encountered two such wayspots. I am attaching the details below.
Wayspot 1(Original):
Cords : 9.122931,76.727104
Above is the original wayspot image.
Following are the images taken today from the actual location.
Wayspot acceptance details :
Duplicate of wayspot 1 :
Coords : 10.931427,76.227283
The above one got approved but is using the exact picture. But only the location is different.
Wayspot 2(Original) :
Coords : 9.121951,76.730676
Wayspot Image & Emails:
Images took today from the original location :
Also attaching below the wayfarer details of the wayspot which is already accepted:
Duplicate of wayspot 2:
The new submission of the same image in another location, under review right now:
So it’s obvious that someone is reusing images from OPR to submit new wayspots. If this gets through it will also become a wayspot. These are the ones we encountered because one of the reviewer was the person who submitted it in the first place.
Please take strict action against the player(s) who are submitting wayspots like this.
Comments
The gamespirit in this doing is not at all acceptable. We may never know how many such portals exist. Please do the needeful to cross check the portal photos. I know its a huge task. But it's also a necessary. All trainers and agents please add if any similar problem faced in this post.
Hope Niantic takes the necessary action to stop such abuse in future.
@NianticCasey-ING Is there any plan to integrate some kind of picture analysis/duplication finder to automate that sort of work on the 2021 roadmap? Photo analysis is resource consuming, but we're at a point where not a single week goes by without someone reporting some sort of large scale abuse, with little tools to spot them, barely no consequence for the offenders and no reward for the diligent reviewers who go the extra miles to investigate them.
There's so much Niantic could be put in place: automatically rejects nominations where the main and supporting pictures are the same, compare new nominations pictures (both main and support) with already approved nominations in a X km radius, talk with your Google Cloud contact -since you're hosting Wayfarer there and a company like you definitively has a point of contact- to possibly set something in place to report and punish fake photospheres efficiently (not sure how Google would react if they realize that Wayfarer is generating dozens if not hundred of fake photospheres every week and Niantic did nothing about it by the way)... yet we're let in our own devices, with less effective means and less to gain than the people abusing the system.
Edit: quick stray thought: is Wayfarer Section 230-compliant considering the relative lack of protection to stop user content (here, pictures) from being stolen and used without the approbation of their owners? Not a lawyer, just a question that popped in my mind.
Please take quick action.A good player in any game not even ingress this type or any type of abuse will not allow .I could understand the photos submitted to prove the abuse done by some players .Please look into this matter . We trust you .
This is a serious issue. Imagine you are traveling to somewhere and opens up the game to find a fake wayspot with a photo that you took. It will be extremely heartbreaking. Niantic has to find a permanent solution for this. And the players who are found Guilty of this abuse should be banned from Wayfarer permanently.
At first I thought this has something to do with a person complaining in this forum that his account got banned and Wayspots in his local area went disappeared, which turns out he's violating the ToS by creating fake Wayspots for anyone paying to him.
By the way, @NianticEG @NianticAndres @NianticGiffard please take a look at this?
All very good suggestions - may I also add automated reverse-image search for photos? There were several cases where I reverse-Googled suspicious photos and found that they were stolen from third party sources.
There's one issue with that: you're the owner of any picture you submit (c.f. the ToS, if I'm not mistaken), so technically you could post them elsewhere, which would generate a false positive. I also don't know how easy it is to process reverse-image queries results.
At the very least -and I hope they do it with the new review form- they should add a button to let reviewers quickly do reserve-image searches. I've seen that on certain dating sites to see if people are catfishes: you could press a button to do Google or Tineye queries without having to copy the pictures URLs.
The agent who submitted the original wayspot said the stolen ones were removed. Much to my astonishment I found out one of them was a picture of a wayspot I submitted. So the player who every it was submitting wayspots, all of them were stolen ones. I hope Niantic took strict action against him. Thanks 😊
@WandHerring-PGO In Chrome on desktop of the things I can do is right click an image and "Search Google for image". I occasionally find it useful when reviewing.
Thanks for flagging, @iHellrai5er-PGO! We have reviewed the report and have taken action on the Wayspots and Wayfinders in accordance with our policies. Thank you!
Thank you for taking time to review the request. Really appreciate it @NianticEG .
Hi Niantic, sorry to again open this thread. But the same location is being chosen for reporting more of such fake submissions. Someone is again reusing pics and submitting the same wayspots which were removed as part of the last sweep. Two are active already.
Please look into this as someone is again exploiting the wayfarer system. @NianticEG
New fake submissions are there in wayfarer from this region.
Original
Please take a look at this @NianticAaron @NianticCasey-ING
We have reviewed the report and have taken action on the Wayspot in accordance with our policies. Thanks for helping us maintain the quality of the Wayspots.
@NianticGiffard Much appreciated..