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

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

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.

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.

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.

<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

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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".

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

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