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

(nianticlabs.com)
387 points bookstore-romeo | 3 comments | 19 Nov 24 20:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.433s | source
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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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PittleyDunkin ◴[21 Nov 24 01:29 UTC] No.42200093[source]▶
> I have been tricked into working to contribute training data so that they can profit off my labor

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

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ipsum2 ◴[21 Nov 24 01:41 UTC] No.42200179[source]▶
Niantic made 700 million dollars last year, mostly selling virtual game items.
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PittleyDunkin ◴[21 Nov 24 01:44 UTC] No.42200200[source]▶
Why would anyone think niantic would protect user-data from profit?
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saxonww ◴[21 Nov 24 01:57 UTC] No.42200292[source]▶
Sarcastically, no one should.

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.

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PittleyDunkin ◴[21 Nov 24 02:01 UTC] No.42200317[source]▶
> Unsarcastically, a lot of people believe user data belongs to users, and that they should have a say in how it's used

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

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1. saxonww ◴[21 Nov 24 02:22 UTC] No.42200439[source]▶
Is that true?

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.

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2. PittleyDunkin ◴[21 Nov 24 03:19 UTC] No.42200771[source]▶
> In the US, people get very upset about things like traffic cameras, and public surveillance in general.

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.

3. RandomThoughts3 ◴[21 Nov 24 08:45 UTC] No.42202338[source]▶
GDPR is about personal information.

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