The CIA-backed mapping entrepreneur behind Street View built the world’s top AR game

Evidence

Back in 2009, as we saw in Chapter 5, Google Maps product vice president and Street View boss John Hanke ignored the Broughton protestors, insisting that only he and Google knew what was best, not just for Broughton but for all people. Now here was Hanke again at surveillance capitalism’s next frontier, this time as the founder of the company behind Pokémon Go, Niantic Labs. Hanke, you may recall, nursed an abiding determination to own the world by mapping it. He had founded Keyhole, the satellite mapping startup funded by the CIA and later acquired by Google and rechristened as Google Earth. At Google, he was a vice president for Google Maps and a principal in its controversial push to commandeer public and private space through its Street View project. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 975

Categorization

• XREF: The through-line from CIA-funded Keyhole to Google Earth to Niantic/Pokémon Go is a concrete instance of the national-security-state origins of the surveillance economy—ties to the book’s overall arc and to the reader’s platform-capitalism theme.
• SEED: A profile angle: how one entrepreneur’s drive to ‘own the world by mapping it’ moved from state surveillance origins into consumer gaming.