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

Just for clarity on this comment and a separate one, Niantic is a Google spin out company and appears to still be majority shareholder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic,_Inc.#As_an_independen...

But I think your point, if I understand it correctly, is that the in-game rewards kind of "hacked your brain" to do it, which is the part you're objecting to?

Are you also fine with taking pictures of pretty women on the street (hey, they'd be walking there anyway) and posting them online and farming ad revenue? Or training a model on their likeness for porn?

which is totally unfair, every niantic player should have access to all the stuff because they collectively made it

What they're doing is (IMO) evil and anti-human and I do not want to be part of it

I don't think I've done any in PoGo (so I know it's very optional), but I've done plenty in Ingress, and I honestly don't see how it's possible to be surprised that it was contributing to something like this? It is hardly an intuitively native standalone gameplay mechanic in either game.

Like when captchas were for making old books readable it felt a lot more friendly than now where its all driverless car nonsense

All of which I've directly contributed to and never (directly) recieved anything in return

The better metaphor is a woman posting her photos online and then those photos were used by a painter who then sold an abstract painting of her.

To be fair, you received a service for free that you may have otherwise had to pay for. I'm not saying it's just, but to say you didn't get anything in return is disingenuous.

is a webcam of Times Square, and they've got ads on the page, and they're making money off pictures of pretty men and women on that street. I don't know how okay or not I am with it, but it's the world we live in.

The connection is a ship, built in Connecticut, which brought gold rushers to San Francisco and was run aground and converted to a hotel there: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic_(whaling_vessel)

The company was named after the ship.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/01/style/bill-cunningham-boo...

I don't understand this perspective. While all players may have collectively made this model possible, no individual player could make a model like it based on their contributions alone.

Since no single player could replicate this outcome based on only their data, does it not imply that there's value created from collecting (and incentivizing collection of) the data, and subsequently processing it to create something?

It actually seems more unfair to demand the collective result for yourself, when your own individual input is itself insufficient to have created it in the first place.

I don't think producers of data are inherently entitled to all products produced from said data.

Is a farmer entitled to the entirety of your work output because you ate a vegetable grown on their farm?

Were you tricked, or were you just poorly compensated for your time?

Bad analogy. I pay a farmer (directly or indirectly) for the vegetable. It’s a simple, understood, transaction. These players were generally unaware that they were gathering data for Niantic in this way.

If data is crowdsourced it should belong to the crowd.

https://research.nianticlabs.com/mapfree-reloc-benchmark

This was linked the news post (search for "data that we released").

I recall having a conversation circa 2004/5 with a colleague that Google was an AI company, not a search company.

"You used me... for LAND DEVELOPMENT! ...That wasn't very nice."

You were playing a game without paying for it. How did you imagine they were making money without pimping your data?

I don't think this is very difficult to sort out: people feel entitled to the products of their labor.

> Is a farmer entitled to the entirety of your work output because you ate a vegetable grown on their farm?

This is comparing apples and oranges: presumably the consumer didn't do anything to produce the vegetable. Hell if anything, under this analogy niantic would owe users a portion of their profits.

If you enjoy the game, play the game. Don’t boycott/withhold because they figured out an additional use for data that didn’t previously exist.

Another way of viewing this: GoogleMaps is incredibly high quality mapping software with lots of extra features. It is mostly free (for the end user). If no one uses it, Google doesn’t collect the data and nobody can benefit from the analysis of the data (eg. Traffic and ETA on Google Maps)

There’s no reason to hold out for a company to pay you for your geolocation data because none of them offer that service.

Unsarcastically, a lot of people believe user data belongs to users, and that they should have a say in how it's used. Here, I think the point is that Niantic decided they could use the data this way and weren't transparent about it until it was already done. I'm sure I would be in the minority, but I would never have played - or never have done certain things like the research tasks - had I known I was training an AI model.

I'm sure the Po:Go EULA that no one reads has blanket grants saying "you agree that we can do whatever we want," so I can't complain too hard, but still disappointed I spent any time in that game.

I can understand that people believe this, but why do they do? Nothing in our society operates in a way that might imply this.

Not saying you are saying this but it amused me how many people believe(d) that Apple wasn’t mining and hoarding location data either because well, they’re Apple and they love you. All those traffic statuses in Apple Maps on minor side streets with no monitoring came from the … traffic fairy, perhaps.

Additionally, many people can contribute to make something greater that benefits everyone (see open source). So the argument of “you couldn’t have done this on your own” also doesn’t hold any water.

The only thing that protects niantic is just a shitty ToS like the rest of the games that nobody pays attention to. There is nothing fundamentally “right” about what they did.

Niantic was always open with the fact that they gather location data, particularly in places cars can't go - I remember an early blog post saying as much before they were unbundled from Google. No one was tricked, they were just not paying attention.

Off the top of my head I think GDPR in the EU might have something to say about this. I don't know if those protections exist anywhere else or not.

In the US, people get very upset about things like traffic cameras, and public surveillance in general. Those are usually data-for-punishment vs. data-for-profit (...maybe?), but people here resist things like data recorders in their cars to lower car insurance.

At least to me, being unhappy about Niantic's behavior here does not seem the least bit unusual.

I can't tell you why other people wouldn't think of this concern

Magic schoolbus!

Yea, take that llm model maker

People get upset about a lot of things in the US. In fact—for some unknown reason we consider it a form of political activity to get upset over things. However, there is not any political party trying to court voters by advocating for dismantling the intelligence state.

I don't understand what this has to do with the topic at hand. Are you suggesting that people can't conceive of the sale of their data because they can conceive of whales amortizing the cost of their video games? That seems contradictory in your estimation of people's ability to grasp the world.

(And I don't even mean only that it complies with the exact wording of the fine print that nobody reads anyway, but also that everyone expects the terms-and-conditions to say that the company owns all the data. So no surprises to anyone.)

I'm fairly sure, if you read the terms-and-conditions, it probably said that the company owns this data and can do what they want with it.

> There’s no reason to hold out for a company to pay you for your geolocation data because none of them offer that service.

Well, it can make perfect sense (to some people) to hold out forever in that case.

That was fairly obvious at the time. And people used more or less exactly the same language to describe the world back then, too.

> These kinds of comments are extraordinarily disingenuous sounding, particularly when anyone can spend 3 seconds and figure out their primary market is literal children.

Poke Mongo was popular with people of all age groups, and (most) children have parents or other guardians to help them with these decisions.

you werent tricked - your location data doesn't belong to you when you use the game.

I don't get why people somehow feel that they are entitled to the post-facto profit/value derived from the data that at the time they're willingly giving away before they "knew of" the potential value.

It's perhaps more like: some folks an Niantic wanted to make a Pokemon game, and this way they could make it financially viable?

Nitpicking aside, I agree with you.

The goalposts of what counts as AI are constantly moving further and further away. Simple algorithms like A* once counted as part of AI.

The farmers you buy the vegetables from are also generally unaware of how you use them, too!

I fail to see how you're differentiating the analogy from the original example.

(I realize you can pay, but are not required to)

<insert obnoxious EU-akshually>

I CALL BS. We paid ALL THE TIME! We pay even item's capacity so much they need to increase the limit recently[1].

Ref:

[1] https://www.facebook.com/PokemonGO/posts/1102918761192160

What labor, though? They took a few pictures and videos (hell, they probably still have a copy of them, so giving a copy to Niantic is essentially free), and were generally compensated for doing that (through in-game rewards, but compensated nonetheless).

The "labor" that transformed the many players' many bits of data was done by Niantic, and thus I would argue that Niantic is the rightful beneficiary of any value that could not be generated by any individual player. To my earlier point, every player could retain a copy of every photo/video they submitted to Niantic, and still be unable to produce this model from it.

> This is comparing apples and oranges: presumably the consumer didn't do anything to produce the vegetable. Hell if anything, under this analogy niantic would owe users a portion of their profits.

The players are also compensated for their submissions, are they not? It doesn't matter that it's not with "real money", in-game rewards are still compensation.

If you agree that a farmer is not entitled to any (much less all!) of your work output because they contributed to feeding you, you agree that the players are not entitled to the models produced by Niantic.

Maybe I'd accept the argument that a player might be entitled to the model generated by training on _only_ that player's data, but I think we'd agree that would be a pretty worthless model.

The value comes from the work Niantic put in to collate the data and build the model. Someone who contributed a tiny fragment of the training data isn't entitled to any of that added value (much less all of it, as the OP was seeming to demand), just like a farmer isn't entitled to any of your work output (much less all of it!) by contributing a fragment of your caloric intake.

"How did you imagine they were making money without pimping your data?"

I imagined they were making money in the big obvious way they make money!

I can conceive of them selling user data, but it's not their core business model, and they would operate basically the same if they couldn't sell user data. It was never some obvious thing that they would do this.

They were pretty up-front about it bring a technology demo for a game engine they were building. It was obvious from the start that they would build future games on the same platform.

This is more like paying the farmhands.

If we're looking at my work output, eh, everyone that works on a copyrighted thing gets a personal license to it? That sounds like it would work out okay.

> I don't think producers of data are inherently entitled to all products produced from said data.

It depends on how directly the data is tied to the output. This seems pretty direct.

I beg your pardon?

Consider just about any physical belonging — say, a book. When I buy a book, it belongs to me. When I read a book in my home, I expect it to be a private experience (nobody data-mining my eyeball movements, for example).

This applies to all sorts of things. Even electronic things — if I put some files on a USB stick I expect them to be "mine" and used as I please, not uploaded to the cloud behind my back, or similar.

And if we're just limiting ourselves to what we do in public (eg: collecting pokemon or whatever), it's still normal, I think, to interact relatively anonymously with the world. You don't expect people to remember you after meeting them once, for example.

In summary, I'd say that "things in our society" very much include people (and their tendency to forget or not care about you), and physical non-smart objects. Smart phones and devices that do track your every move and do remember everything are the exception, not the rule.

I wish it were that simple but I think it's reasonable to hesitate. We don't know what these models are going to be used for. If by playing you're unwittingly letting something powerful fall into the wrong hands, maybe play something else.

(Generally speaking. I'm not trying to throw stones at Niantic specifically here.)

Everything “free” coming from a company means they’ve found a way to monetise you in some way. The big long ToS we all casually accept without reading says so too.

Other random examples which appear free but aren’t: using a search engine, using the browser that comes with your phone, instagram, YouTube… etc.

It’s not always about data collection, sometimes it’s platform lock-in, or something else but there is always a side of it that makes sense for their profit margin.

Perhaps this is just my own brain's degradation, but how far removed from society do you need to be to expect your purchases to not be sold to the highest bidder? This practice is certainly older than I am.

Forgive me if I cannot conceive of a consumer who has completely tuned out the last forty years of discourse about consumer protection. Hell, the credit bureaus themselves contradict the concept of consumer privacy.

There are plenty of non-scan tasks you can do to get those rewards as well but I do think Poffins (largely useless unless you are grinding Best Buddies) are locked behind scan tasks.

Source: Me. This is the one topic I am very qualified to speak to on this website.

Every app you open on Mac sends a "ping" to Apples servers.

https://acecilia.medium.com/apple-is-sending-a-request-to-th....

That is how monetization for free to play games have worked for a very long time now. Changing that without letting people know up front is absolutely a betrayal of trust.

Sure, copying it is approximately free. But using it provides value, and sharing the model dilutes the value of its usage. The fact that it's free to copy doesn't mean it's free to share. The value of the copy that Niantic uses will be diluted by every copy they make and share with someone else.

> Additionally, many people can contribute to make something greater that benefits everyone (see open source). So the argument of “you couldn’t have done this on your own” also doesn’t hold any water.

Your second sentence does not logically follow from the first. In fact, your first sentence is an excellent example of the point I was making: many people contribute to open-source projects, and the value of the vast majority of those contributions on their own do not amount to the sum total value of the projects they've contributed to. This is what I meant by "your own individual input is itself insufficient to have created it in the first place". Sure, many people contribute to open source projects to make them what they are, but in the vast majority of cases, any individual contributor on their own would be unable to create those same projects.

To rephrase your first sentence: the value of the whole is greater than the value of the parts. There is value in putting all the pieces together in the right way, and that value should rightfully be allocated to those who did the synthesis, not to those who contributed the parts.

Is a canvas-maker entitled to every painting produced on one of their canvasses? Without the canvas the painting would not exist--but merely producing the canvas does not make it into a painting. The value is added by the artist, not the canvas-maker--therefore the value for the produced art should mostly go to the artist, not the canvas-maker. The canvas maker is compensated for the value of the canvas itself (which isn't much), and is entitled to nothing beyond.

> The only thing that protects niantic is just a shitty ToS like the rest of the games that nobody pays attention to. There is nothing fundamentally “right” about what they did.

There's also nothing fundamentally wrong about it, either, which was my point. Well, my point was actually that it's even more shitty to demand the sum total of the output when you only contributed a tiny slice of the input.

Credit cards and Banks sold your data to third parties for marketing purposes.

Payroll companies like ADP also shared your data with the credit agencies.

This is not a new phenomenon and has been the currency of a number of industries for a while.

The only thing that has changed is the types of data collected. Personally, I think these older forms of data collection are quite a bit more insidious than some of the data mining done by a game like Niantic for some ml model.

I have a lot more control over and less insidious consequences from these types of data collection. I can avoid the game or service if I like. There isn't much I can do to prevent a credit agency from collecting my data.

It depends quite a bit on how you make your purchases.

If your purchases are on a credit card, with a loyalty ("tracking") card or App(TM) involved in the purchase? They're absolutely being sold to... well, probably not the highest bidder, but "all bidders with a valid payment account on file."

If you make a habit of paying cash for things and not using Apps or loyalty cards, and don't have your pocket beacon blaring loudly away on a range of radio frequencies when you shop, I expect a lot less data sales. It's a bit of a transition if you're used to credit cards, but once you're used to it, it's not bad at all, and involves a lot less data collection. I don't mind if the local barista or bartender knows me and my preferences, but I do mind if their POS system is uploading that data continuously.

I was just providing some counter-examples to show that there's more than nothing at play, here.

Certainly there are oodles of examples of our data being sold behind our backs, even well before 40 years ago. But there are also oodles of examples of the opposite.

If you weren't aware until now and were having fun is this outcome so bad? Did you have a work contract with this company to provide labor for wages and they didn't pay you? if not, then I don't think you can be upset that they are possibly profiting from your "labor".

Every time we visit a site that is free, which means 99.9% of all websites, that website bore a cost for our visit. Sometimes they show us ads which sometimes offsets the cost of creating the content and hosting it.

I am personally very glad with this arrangement. If a site is too ad filled, I just leave immediately.

With a game that is free and fun, I would be happy that I didn't have to pay anything and that the creator figured out a way for both parties to get something out of the deal. Isn't that a win-win situation?

Also, calling your experience "labor" when you were presumably having fun (if you weren't then why were you playing without expectation for payment in return?) is disingenuous.

At some point we need to be realistic about the world in which we live. Companies provide things for free or for money. If they provide something for "free", then we can't really expect to be compensated for our "labor" playing the game and that yes, the company is probably trying to figure out how to recoup their investment.

So obviously, now that Niantic is getting things outside the game its reasonable the people who did the work ask for something from that.

Lots of cope here. Ostensibly, some people cant handle a simple observable fact.

Note to future digital me, do as I did 2007-2014. I approve.

You grew apples, I grew oranges.

Are you entitled to my oranges just because you grew apples?

If I mapped the area around my home, am I entitled to your efforts in mapping other areas of the world?

Despite what success fantasies and other self-help garbage teach people, a lot of society — most of it, actually — does not work on greed. That you can ignore thinking about it is itself a statement about deep foundations under the shallow bling.

I just do not believe that. It sounds like a bug in a beta release. I'm sure I would have noticed if every ls I run took 6 seconds, and I'm sure many others would have too. Heck, I've used a Mac with the network turned off and it sure doesn't just refuse to run everything.

> Unsarcastically, a lot of people believe user data belongs to users, and that they should have a say in how it's used.

At some point this stops being a fair complaint, though. Most of the AI-related cases IMO are such.

To put it bluntly: expecting to be compensated for anything that can be framed as one's labor is such an extreme level of greed that even Scrooge McDuck would be ashamed of. In fact, trying to capture all value one generates, is at the root of most if not all underhanded or downright immoral business practices in companies both large and small.

The way society works best, is when people stop trying to catch all the value they generate. That surplus is what others can use to contribute to the whole, and then you can use some of their uncaptured value, and so on. That's how symbiotic relationships form; that's how ecosystems work.

> I'm sure I would be in the minority, but I would never have played - or never have done certain things like the research tasks - had I known I was training an AI model.

I have a feeling you wouldn't be in minority here, at least not among people with any kind of view on this.

Still, with AI stuff, anyone's fair share is $0, because that's how much anyone's data is worth on the margin.

It's also deeply ironic that nobody cares when people's data is being used to screw them over directly - such as profiling or targeting ads; but the moment someone figures out how to monetize this data in a way that doesn't screw over the source, suddenly everyone is up in arms, because they aren't getting their "fair share".

I would argue that's being legally truthful, but not practically truthful. The company knows there are ways they can ensure their consumers are aware of the truth. And they know that burying it in Ts and Cs isn't one of them.

Being somehow surprised they actually plan to do things with the data they have you gather is a bit weird.

If they just keep the positional data and location information like the video gathered without linking them to a player, it’s perfectly fine.

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/406246/all-applica... or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959

But that's all kinda besides the point. Companies invading users privacy is pretty common, you just need to look

Absolutely not.

If you are compensated for doing something, you can’t suddenly come back for more 5 years later because it was used as part of something bigger which is now making money.

I have little sympathy for the players here. If you are voluntarily doing free work for worthless virtual things, you can’t come complaining when it dawns on you that it might have been dumb from the start (and to be fair maybe it wasn’t and they did it because it was fun which is completely ok).

I guess we could ban in game shop and game reward for real work as they are somehow predatory but that would be a bit paternalistic.

(I'm not saying that they shouldn't use the game data for training.)