Niantic announces “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

I'm sure the CIA already has access. [1] People were raising privacy concerns years ago. [2]

[1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/953621/the-cia-nsa-and-...

[2] https://kotaku.com/the-creators-of-pokemon-go-mapped-the-wor...

More like Celesteela, after all, you need jet fuel to melt steel beams.

Google maps has more data than PGO could ever hope to have.

People have a lot of strange beliefs about the CIA. Why would they even care about this?

Upload a picture of a bad guy in an office lobby to pokegpt and ask it where he is.

You can do that for free by sending the picture to a geoguessr streamer on twitch.

Or Google Lens. Regardless this isn't the CIA, it's the NGIA.

Hanke’s actually got awards from CIA for his work at In-Q-Tel investing in Keyhole/Niantic, so yeah, safe to assume that the agency invested specifically to have players collect data. Considering many Pokémon were on or near military bases around the world… not hard to assume what CIA’s real goal was.

https://futurism.com/the-byte/pokemon-go-trespassers-militar...

But you only use Maps when you need directions.

I don’t think this is sarcasm.

Until pretty recently, phone telemetry data was a free-for-all, and if you’re, say, in legal trouble, a map of the location of your phone over the past… however long you’ve had your phone is immediately available.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel is a major investor into Niantic.

I was wondering about the privacy implications: given a photo, the LGM could decode it to not just positioning, but also time-of-day and season (and maybe even year, or specific unique dates e.g. concerts, group activities).

Colors, amount of daylight(/nightlight), weather/precipitation/heat haze, flowers and foliage, traffic patterns, how people are dressed, other human features (e.g. signage and/or decorations for Easter/Halloween/Christmas/other events/etc.)

(as the press release says: "In order to solve positioning well, the LGM has to encode rich geometrical, appearance and cultural information into scene-level features"... but then it adds "And, as noted, beyond gaming LGMs will have widespread applications, including spatial planning and design, logistics, audience engagement, and remote collaboration.") So would they predict from a trajectory (multiple photos + inferred timeline) whether you kept playing/ stopped/ went to buy refreshments?

As written it doesn't say the LGM will explicitly encode any player-specific information, but I guess it could be deanonymized (esp. infer who visited sparsely-visited locations).

(Yes obviously Niantic and data brokers already have much more detailed location/time/other data on individual user behavior, that's a given.)