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

(nianticlabs.com)
387 points bookstore-romeo | 7 comments | 19 Nov 24 20:02 UTC | HN request time: 1.032s | source | bottom
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relyks ◴[20 Nov 24 22:26 UTC] No.42198768[source]▶
This is pretty cool, but I feel as a pokehunter (Pokemon Go player), I have been tricked into working to contribute training data so that they can profit off my labor. How? They consistently incentivize you to scan pokestops (physical locations) through "research tasks" and give you some useful items as rewards. The effort is usually much more significant than what you get in return, so I have stopped doing it. It's not very convenient to take a video around the object or location in question. If they release the model and weights, though, I will feel I contributed to the greater good.
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1. AlphaWeaver ◴[21 Nov 24 02:01 UTC] No.42200311[source]▶
Imagine how those of us who played Ingress (Niantic's first game) feel... We were tricked into contributing location data for the game we loved, only to see it reused for the far more popular (and profitable) Pokemon Go.
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2. jcpham2 ◴[21 Nov 24 02:14 UTC] No.42200383[source]▶
The Google - Niantic - Ingress - borg - kubernetes conspiracy must be unraveled
3. sangnoir ◴[21 Nov 24 02:15 UTC] No.42200387[source]▶
Why would anyone take issue with this? Asking as someone who tried both games at different points.

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.

4. lithiumii ◴[21 Nov 24 02:25 UTC] No.42200457[source]▶
As long as they make enough money from Pokemon Go to sustain Ingress, I OK with that.
5. try_the_bass ◴[21 Nov 24 04:02 UTC] No.42200973[source]▶
I didn't feel tricked. Still don't.

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.

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6. themoonisachees ◴[21 Nov 24 07:50 UTC] No.42202060[source]▶
Right? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here and on Lemmy, the whole point of ingress was that it was made to sell Google mapping data and point of interest data, that's why the game didn't have monetizing practices for so long (of course it started having them once all the data was sold but hey)
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7. 0xEF ◴[21 Nov 24 09:35 UTC] No.42202558{3}[source]▶
I'm with you and the previous commenter. People who feel "tricked" we're only fooled by their own blindness. Sorry, but then trying to garner sympathy for that is like being asked to feel bad for the stripper that takes her clothes off for money; they both 100% knew what they were getting into and no other reasonable expectations can be had from engaging in that situation.

Facebook has been around something like a decade, now? I forget the exact number, but it's been long enough that everyone should have learned their lesson at this point; if you are creating data, be it personal, geospatial or otherwise, by using a product expect that data to be used as a commodity by the makes of said product.