Google Developer Apologizes for Including Concentration Camp in Augmented Reality Game Ingress

[Shawn Zipay]

Niantic Labs, a Google subsidiary, has apologized for including concentration camps in their popular ARG, Ingress.

Ingress essentially has players going around "capturing" popular locations and moments for their team. It's all done in the real world utilizing your phone's GPS to aid in your discovery and capture of locations (called Portals in the game) in your immediate area. It just so happened that some of these locations ended up being concentration camps.

German news outlet, Die Zeit, reported that those places included Dachau, Sachsenhausen, and more.

“All of us here are completely appalled,” the head of the Sachsenhausen Memorial told Die Zeit. “This is most definitely no place for video games.”

Gabriele Hammermann, director of the memorial site at Dachau, told the dpa news agency that Google's actions were a humiliation for victims and relatives of the Nazi camps.

John Hanke, Niantic Labs' founder, said that they "apologize that this has happened."

(Thanks to signa for bringing this to my attention. Sources include: AP and Consumerist)