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

(nianticlabs.com)
383 points bookstore-romeo | 4 comments | 19 Nov 24 20:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | 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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isodev ◴[21 Nov 24 04:15 UTC] No.42201047[source]▶
> I feel … I have been tricked

Everything “free” coming from a company means they’ve found a way to monetise you in some way. The big long ToS we all casually accept without reading says so too.

Other random examples which appear free but aren’t: using a search engine, using the browser that comes with your phone, instagram, YouTube… etc.

It’s not always about data collection, sometimes it’s platform lock-in, or something else but there is always a side of it that makes sense for their profit margin.

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1. 9dev ◴[21 Nov 24 06:50 UTC] No.42201793[source]▶
Hiding shady or unexpected stuff in the TOS is illegal in the EU and other countries for example. So just because some companies behave amoral, that doesn’t mean we just have to accept hundreds of pages of legalese being able to dictate us.
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2. phito ◴[21 Nov 24 08:38 UTC] No.42202298[source]▶
We don't have to accept it no, but also you shouldn't be dumbfounded when it happens. Always assume everyone is doing it.
3. RandomThoughts3 ◴[21 Nov 24 08:42 UTC] No.42202317[source]▶
I don’t think there is something amoral here. Niantic explicitly sends players to take videos of places for rewards. It’s not like it’s done in a sneaky way.

Being somehow surprised they actually plan to do things with the data they have you gather is a bit weird.

4. flir ◴[21 Nov 24 09:07 UTC] No.42202433[source]▶
Niantic have never made a secret of the fact that they're crowdsourcing to enrich their mapping data (eg data from Wayfarer and Ingress was used to seed Pokemon Go and Wizards Unite). I can't see it as a sudden gotcha, as it's practically their USP.