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

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.

<insert obnoxious EU-akshually>

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....

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.

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

Sure, but that disconnect between what people think and how things work is almost fully general over all subjects.

I've seen people (behave as if they) think translation is just the words, but that leads to "hydraulic ram" becoming "water sheep". People who want antibiotics for viral infections, or who refuse vaccines (covid and other) claiming they're "untested" or have "side effects" while promoting alternatives that both failed testing and have known side effects. I've seen people speak as if government taxation only exists because the guy in charge of taxes is, personally, greedy. I've heard anecdotes of people saying that you can get people to follow the rules by saying "first rule is to always follow the rules" and directly seen people talk as if banning something is sufficient to make it stop.

The idea that it's even possible to do make a model like this from the user data, is probably mind-blowing to a lot of people.

The naïve assumption most people seem to have is that computers do only what they, personally as end-users, tell them to do, and that they're as slow as the ad-riddled web front-end with needlessly slow transition animations placed there to keep user engagement high — rather than the truth, that software primarily does what the operator of the service wants it to do, and that it's absolutely possible for a home PC[0] to hold and query a database of all 8 billion people on the planet and the two trillion or so different personal relationships between them.

When GenAI images were new, some of the artists communities said "That content generated can reference hundreds, even thousands of pieces of work from other artists to create derivative images"[1], rather than millions of images, because the scale of computer performance is far beyond the comprehension of the average person. The fact that the average single image contributes so little to any given model that it can't even represent its own filename, even moreso.

And so it is with stuff like this: what can be done, cannot be comprehended by the people who, theoretically, gave consent that their data be used in that way.

[0] Of course, these days most people don't have home PCs; phone, perhaps a tablet, they may have a small low performance media server if they're fancy, but what we here would think of as a PC is to all that as a Ferrari etc. is to a Honda Civic.

[0] https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/10321622