- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
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Unknowingly?
Ingress was quite transparent about the goal of gathering real-world data to allows development of future technologies like self-driving and navigation.
It’s the reason, why I started playing it around 2012.
Most people just want to collect Pokemon and don’t read up on what the company that made the app is doing.
Just like recaptchas training OCR
And self driving cars
Not even the first alarming issue with Pokemon Go
If anyone ist surprised by that they should look up why niantic was ever founded.
It was always about data collection in the real world.
Nothing is free. All free services are using your data somehow.
If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
In this case, it was mostly children’s data.
True for Corps but not everything
If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
Except most free and open-source software, major open knowledge bases, literally the social media service you’re using to communicate this point right now…
While understandable when talking about services by for-profit corporations, this talking point without that context is oversimplified to the point of being obnoxious in a world where I can set up a desktop OS with a fully featured environment and software suite then go browse a social media site where at no stage was anything free where I was the product.
Edit: Moreover, an arguably worse problem with this saying in 2026 is that it implies (doesn’t outright state, but implies to an uninformed reader) that paid services can save them from this, which these days is almost universally untrue.
Yeah, revised version:
If you’re not paying you’re the product. If you are paying you’re still the product and paying for the privilege*.
- Except for not for profit software / platforms.
Humm, that’s not as pithy.
Yeah, I didn’t think I needed to make clear I meant with for profit companies like Nintendo.
Pokémon Go already has multiple revenue streams, including direct in-app purchases.
I think you are forgetting that Niantic made a lot of money off Pokémon GO, not ALL the money, ergo its an abject failure under capitalism and they need to pump up those numbers.
If they had been making ALL the money they might have been satisfied, for a quarter. Then they would have packaged and sold all that data for more than ALL the money.
Yeah, but many players don’t pay, especially the huge player bases of children. They can subsidise that by selling your data.
Pokemon go has been extremely profitable, the free to play model works. They don’t need to subsidize shit.
Free to play games work by being pay2win and by catering to whales. Sorry but you are wrong.
I’ve been in software design and development for decades. Sorry, but you are wrong.
The reason these companies are so profitable is because they sell your data.
Whales are fine, but that’s not their only revenue stream. People freely give up their data to them and that’s stupidly valuable. If you think these companies aren’t selling it, you’re very naive.
And to be clear, you’re saying this in response to an article pointing out they’ve been selling your data.
I’m a data engineer, ofc I know that. But you were excusing it as if their service has costs. That’s bs, because their reported earnings that done without whatever profit they are going to gain from this harvest of train data already were very profitable.
That’s why I said you were in the wrong. Not because you expected them to sell everything they could, so did I, but because you justified that behaviour from the free to play model. That model exists in plenty games that are extremely successful without harvesting things beyond metadata.
I wasn’t justifying it. Perhaps that came across the wrong way.
They’re selling shit they never asked their users for and that’s bullshit, and should be illegal. Especially with children’s data.
My point was they’re doing it.
You guys agree and it’s just the word “subsidy” he has an issue with because subsidies have the connotation of helping actual people.
Is the fediverse free?
While the admins and donations make it free, I guarantee there’s at least a few corporations or government organizations out there scraping the fediverse to gather data. So even though the people hosting it might not have any bad intentions, an open platform like this will still feed the data hungry machine.
scraping the fediverse
Saturday I was looking up bottles and raftvr, one of the links brought me back to LEMMY!!!
Again, I meant for profit companies, like Nintendo.
Volunteer led orgs are different. Particularly those run by socialists.
e: most volunteer/socialist orgs don’t have ‘customers’.
Yay, thanks
I don’t expect most people still playing Pokémon go are actually kids 😅 I could be wrong, but as someone playing it until pretty recenly and who had friends who still played it at various points I don’t think its really popular with kids anymore
Even at release the majority were adults
Even if the data comes from kids, it’s not identifiable or personal. It could loosely fall under unpaid child labour if the in-game task is actually just a job in disguise.
the same budget
How much did this it cost to collect all this data?
What cost? The data collectors paid us!
But you don’t understand! Some of those Charizards were shiny!
I feel like that tweet has been written by AI
I agree. Something about llms where they use strange wording like the last sentence or “its not just x its y” type phrases
Is this bad? I mean I guess it has the potential to damage delivery workers, but isn’t working for grubhub or doordash already kind of a scam anyway? That’s before we consider that the likelyhood of any product coming to market that could actually successfully do deliveries. Sounds like a job complicated beyond the capabilities of any robot now or in the near future anyway.
It’s bad under capitalism, because it means that the ruling class get to keep an even higher percentage of profits.
Under socialism, it’s good.
Fully automated luxury gay space communism would be awesome, but until we get socialism, we should take cues from the luddite movement.
I am not saying capitalism is flawless. It gets ugly quite often. But how do you know it’s good under socialism? Have you lived in socialist society or know any examples where it thrives. Socialism idea being romanticised a lot these days. Sadly reality proves it’s an utopian model.
Hey, thanks for the thoughtful question, sorry to see people downvoting you.
Socialism is a broad tent - all it functionally means is that instead of the ruling class owning all of the factories, businesses, hotels, etc. where people work, the actual people who do the work own and control their workplace. Instead of having a single boss at work who owns the place, you’d have a stake of ownership yourself, and equal say over your workplace.
So there are obviously lots of different approaches we can take to achieve that, and I agree we need to learn from history and avoid the mistakes of the past.
Capitalism inevitably results in fascism, so it’s a choice either between a utopian ideal that can be difficult to achieve, or a capitalist death cult which is guaranteed to consume as much as it can before it collapses.
Socialism: Drones take over peoples jobs -> These people work something else / everyone works less.
Capitalism: Drones take over peoples jobs -> These people starve.
In a socialist setting, the advent of better and better robots and drones would be a boon for society. Menial and transport jobs can be done by machines, while humans shift their work elsewhere and/or simply work less.
In a capitalist setting, that’s not the case. Robots take over human work, not to free up those humans to do something else, but to raise profits for the owner of those robots. This leads to less and less jobs for people and since your worth and right to live is tied to your job in capitalism, this doesn’t bode well for society.
Large scale automation would be great in a system, that tries to facilitate the best possible living conditions for its citizens with the least amount of work.
Capitalism sadly isn’t interested in making the citizens work as little as possible. It’s interested in generating profit for the people at the top.
…ok, I was with you until “gay space”. Now I’m just confused.
Sorry for confusing you, I was just half-jokingly referencing a meme
You’re not wrong, but my point was the fact that automated deliveries are a far off fantasy. By the time the physical technology exists to do this, the collected data will be irrelevant. Sure it would be better as a communist fantasy, but the reality is this is useless data being sold to companies that want to pretend it’s possible so their stock value goes up.
it literally already exists and is in use, with the market leader having completed over 9 million deliveries, there’s also a viral video of a food delivery robot getting hit by a train
A single company has some robots delivering short distances in three affluent FL cities. Boxes on wheels will work in a tiny fraction of places around the country and the world. The vast majority of the data collected is useless for them. The technology doesn’t exist to do any better either.
Like I said, Coco Robotics the company behind the FL robot deliveries is more likely to be a company hoping to be bought on the promise they can do more in the future than actually expecting to do any more. They’re private, so we don’t even know what their actual economics look like.
I’m sorry, but you’re mistaken. The market leader, Starship Technologies:
As of October 2024, the company operates in over 100 locations in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Finland and Estonia.
Huh, fair enough. Still, I do delivery work as my day job and I’m not worried about a box on wheels taking my job.
Lol the things people tell themselves.
No disrespect, but you probably should worry a little, I don’t mean to be a downer, I want to encourage you to organize, join or form a union, so that we can fight back against this stuff. We really need to get off our collective asses and depose the ruling class, and that will need us to get organized.
This is - unfortunately - not surprising. Niantic has always been in the business of selling/using user data for profit, they were a spin-off from Google after all. Their first big game, Ingress, was used to train Google Maps.
And this is why you dont take AR scans of pokestops/use ar mode. The free $1 poffin isnt worth the betrayal of the area.
Goofy.
When I played I just spoiled the data. I found out that you can just hold a white piece of paper in front of the camera and bounce your phone lightly up and down to simulate movement (since they want you to walk around the real world location you’re photographing). Other persons I played with just photographed their shoes, so Niantic only had useless photos.
I’d guess the majority of players properly adhered to guidelines when doing AR field research. A small minority probably uploaded useless data.
Hey! Whoa! That’s uncalled for!
…Goofy isn’t even a Pokemon.
I thought they were working on getting people to Pokémon Go to the polls!
Holy shit that was almost 10 years ago. Time flies when everyday gets shittier and shittier.
Time flies when you live in a time sucking vacume of existential dread, exacerbated by a deadly global pandemic which was made even worse by a political party trying to prolong the death hoping to gain a political advantage in the then upcoming election.
We live in the dumbest timeline.
I Agree 💯💯💯
All I want is for politics to be something I only have to think about a few months before Election Day. My grandmother who’s in her 80s told me that was the way it was back in the day. Republicans ruined American society all because they are a bunch of stuck up loser bitches and are do nothing good organized criminals.
I always thought that Joe Biden’s campaign slogan should have been “Make Politics Boring Again”
Republicans ruined American society all because they are a bunch of stuck up loser bitches and are do nothing good organized criminals.
I need this printed on a hoodie.
Hillary did some maximum pandering there, but it worked since I dutifully did Pokémon Go to the Polls.
I would have voted for Pikachu
I’d have voted for Psyduck.
Pikachu is a loud high energy narcisist who doesn’t care if he electricutes those cares about. Politically that sounds like trump.
Psyduck is a mentally and emotionally weighted creature who spends all his time empathizing with everybody. Not just those arround him, but the entire planet. He has anxiety because the world just keeps getting darker and scarier. Psy-yi-yi indeed!
Politically I’d say Psyduck is Jimmy Carter.
I feel like this was common knowledge back in 2016. Is this surprising to anyone?
This comes up every couple of months like some freshly uncovered secret. You can see it in Google trends too. I’m surprised to see this being so prevalent over the fediverse, I thought karma farming wasn’t a thing over here.
I thought so too. I seem to remember it almost being a selling point. Like: “Your adventures are being used to improve maps and train AI systems for the future of humanity! Yay!”
But I had a look at their old pages from 2017-2020ish in the Wayback machine and there’s no mention of it. In fact, their privacy policies seemed to try to make it very clear that they don’t sell or share user data except where needed to deliver the service or in anonymised aggregate to third parties (48 people went to your business while playing Pokemon!).
There’s some mention of using it to advertise but none of them mention using it to build an advanced geo-spacial dataset for AI. Unless I’m missing something or reading it wrong?
Might be a Mandela effect.
Definitely not Mandela, but maybe it’s something Google never officially confirmed.
Here’s an article about Ingress, the spiritual predecessor to PkmnGo. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628936-200-why-googles-ingress-game-is-a-data-gold-mine/
I am one of the lucky 10,000 today 😄
Yeah I’ve known about this for like 5 years. It’s not at all new.
This is a reason why you should actually read the Terms of Service and don’t use the product if you don’t agree with them. Niantic’s ability to use your images like this would have been in the ToS.
AI has made this a bit easier since you can copy and paste the ToS into an LLM and ask it summarize the terms and point out the most important clauses (and clauses that aren’t typical)
I used the AI to destroy the AI
<Insert obligated pikachu surprise face>
I don’t automatically have a negative opinion about this, I would need more information before that. Did the terms of service allow for this?
It’s a fascinating case study on crowdsourcing data that is useful to this navigation technology, and reminds me of the first captchas that helped train OCR engines.
Yeah this is like 90% of all of Google’s business model. Captchas to train OCR or tag crosswalks, vehicles, etc. for other computer vision. GOOG-411 to train voice recognition for the Google assistant.
Google voice only makes sense as a data play too, for voicemail data, etc.
YouTube is a massive dataset. Part of their recent crackdowns on downloading tools and 3rd party apps is around keeping that data for themselves.
