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

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.

> 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?

Niantic made 700 million dollars last year, mostly selling virtual game items.

Why would anyone think niantic would protect user-data from profit?

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.

> 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.

You find it strange that people want something different than the wild west status quo (which is not the status quo everywhere, btw) that they may not even fully understand or be informed enough to understand how it works or what the consequences are? like you actually expect even a savvy user of this game to be like ‘oh, of course they would be using my labor to profit for this technology i dont understand, duh?’ what a strange statement and world view.

Wanting something to be a certain way is very different from believing that it is. And yes, I would expect any moderately informed and technically savvy user to assume that the company is doing anything they possibly can to profit off of user data.