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‘Pokémon Go’ players have been unknowingly training delivery robots

⁨401⁩ ⁨likes⁩

Submitted ⁨⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨return2ozma@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨technology@lemmy.world⁩

https://www.popsci.com/technology/pokemon-go-delivery-robots-crowdsourcing/

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Comments

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  • AnotherPenguin@programming.dev ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Just like recaptchas training OCR

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    • unexposedhazard@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      And self driving cars

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  • Flipper@feddit.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    If anyone ist surprised by that they should look up why niantic was ever founded.

    It was always about data collection in the real world.

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  • return2ozma@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Image

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    • dhork@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      But you don’t understand! Some of those Charizards were shiny!

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    • Scrollone@feddit.it ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I feel like that tweet has been written by AI

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      • Euphoma@lemmy.ml ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I agree. Something about llms where they use strange wording like the last sentence or “its not just x its y” type phrases

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  • LillyPip@lemmy.ca ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Nothing is free. All free services are using your data somehow.

    If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.

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    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.

      Except most free and open-source software, major open knowledge bases, literally the social media service you’re using to communicate this point right now…

      While understandable when talking about services by for-profit corporations, this talking point is oversimplified to the point of being obnoxious in a world where I can set up a desktop OS with a fully featured environment and software suite then go browse a social media site where – at no stage – was anything free where I was the product.

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      • LillyPip@lemmy.ca ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Yeah, I didn’t think I needed to make clear I meant with for profit companies.

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      • redhat421@lemmy.world ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Yeah, revised version:

        If you’re not paying you’re the product. If you are paying you’re still the product and paying for the privilege*.

        • Except for not for profit software / platforms.

        Humm, that’s not as pithy.

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    • anyhow2503@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Pokémon Go already has multiple revenue streams, including direct in-app purchases.

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      • LillyPip@lemmy.ca ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Yeah, but many players don’t pay, especially the huge player bases of children. They can subsidise that by selling your data.

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      • shads@lemy.lol ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I think you are forgetting that Niantic made a lot of money off Pokémon GO, not ALL the money, ergo its an abject failure under capitalism and they need to pump up those numbers.

        If they had been making ALL the money they might have been satisfied, for a quarter. Then they would have packaged and sold all that data for more than ALL the money.

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    • architect@thelemmy.club ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      True for Corps but not everything

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    • TheparishofChigwell@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Is the fediverse free?

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      • Brownboy13@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        While the admins and donations make it free, I guarantee there’s at least a few corporations or government organizations out there scraping the fediverse to gather data. So even though the people hosting it might not have any bad intentions, an open platform like this will still feed the data hungry machine.

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      • LillyPip@lemmy.ca ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Again, I meant for profit companies.

        Volunteer led orgs are different.

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    • Cris_Citrus@piefed.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I don’t expect most people still playing Pokémon go are actually kids 😅 I could be wrong, but as someone playing it until pretty recenly and who had friends who still played it at various points I don’t think its really popular with kids anymore

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      • Anivia@feddit.org ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Even at release the majority were adults

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    • pHr34kY@lemmy.world ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Even if the data comes from kids, it’s not identifiable or personal. It could loosely fall under unpaid child labour if the in-game task is actually just a job in disguise.

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  • greenbit@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

    Not even the first alarming issue with Pokemon Go

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  • squirrel@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    This is - unfortunately - not surprising. Niantic has always been in the business of selling/using user data for profit, they were a spin-off from Google after all. Their first big game, Ingress, was used to train Google Maps.

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  • Exusia@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    And this is why you dont take AR scans of pokestops/use ar mode. The free $1 poffin isnt worth the betrayal of the area.

    Goofy.

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    • CatZoomies@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      When I played I just spoiled the data. I found out that you can just hold a white piece of paper in front of the camera and bounce your phone lightly up and down to simulate movement (since they want you to walk around the real world location you’re photographing). Other persons played with just photographed their shoes, so Niantic only had useless photos.

      I’d guess the majority of players properly adhered to guidelines when doing AR field research. A small minority probably uploaded useless data.

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    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Hey! Whoa! That’s uncalled for!

      …Goofy isn’t even a Pokemon.

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  • FRYD@sh.itjust.works ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    Is this bad? I mean I guess it has the potential to damage delivery workers, but isn’t working for grubhub or doordash already kind of a scam anyway? That’s before we consider that the likelyhood of any product coming to market that could actually successfully do deliveries. Sounds like a job complicated beyond the capabilities of any robot now or in the near future anyway.

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    • bearboiblake@pawb.social ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      It’s bad under capitalism, because it means that the ruling class get to keep an even higher percentage of profits.

      Under socialism, it’s good.

      Fully automated luxury gay space communism would be awesome, but until we get socialism, we should take cues from the luddite movement.

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      • moontorchy@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I am not saying capitalism is flawless. It gets ugly quite often. But how do you know it’s good under socialism? Have you lived in socialist society or know any examples where it thrives. Socialism idea being romanticised a lot these days. Sadly reality proves it’s an utopian model.

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      • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        …ok, I was with you until “gay space”. Now I’m just confused.

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      • FRYD@sh.itjust.works ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        You’re not wrong, but my point was the fact that automated deliveries are a far off fantasy. By the time the physical technology exists to do this, the collected data will be irrelevant. Sure it would be better as a communist fantasy, but the reality is this is useless data being sold to companies that want to pretend it’s possible so their stock value goes up.

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  • zarkanian@sh.itjust.works ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I thought they were working on getting people to Pokémon Go to the polls!

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    • PalmTreeIsBestTree@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Holy shit that was almost 10 years ago. Time flies when everyday gets shittier and shittier.

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      • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Time flies when you live in a time sucking vacume of existential dread, exacerbated by a deadly global pandemic which was made even worse by a political party trying to prolong the death hoping to gain a political advantage in the then upcoming election.

        We live in the dumbest timeline.

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    • Gork@sopuli.xyz ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Hillary did some maximum pandering there, but it worked since I dutifully did Pokémon Go to the Polls.

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      • dhork@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        I would have voted for Pikachu

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  • ch00f@lemmy.world ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I feel like this was common knowledge back in 2016. Is this surprising to anyone?

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    • doctor0710@lemmy.zip ⁨41⁩ ⁨minutes⁩ ago

      This comes up every couple of months like some freshly uncovered secret. You can see it in Google trends too. I’m surprised to see this being so prevalent over the fediverse, I thought karma farming wasn’t a thing over here. 

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    • TechLich@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I thought so too. I seem to remember it almost being a selling point. Like: “Your adventures are being used to improve maps and train AI systems for the future of humanity! Yay!”

      But I had a look at their old pages from 2017-2020ish in the Wayback machine and there’s no mention of it. In fact, their privacy policies seemed to try to make it very clear that they don’t sell or share user data except where needed to deliver the service or in anonymised aggregate to third parties (48 people went to your business while playing Pokemon!).

      There’s some mention of using it to advertise but none of them mention using it to build an advanced geo-spacial dataset for AI. Unless I’m missing something or reading it wrong?

      Might be a Mandela effect.

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      • ch00f@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨hour⁩ ago

        Definitely not Mandela, but maybe it’s something Google never officially confirmed.

        Here’s an article about Ingress, the spiritual predecessor to PkmnGo. newscientist.com/…/mg21628936-200-why-googles-ing…

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    • errer@lemmy.world ⁨8⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Yeah I’ve known about this for like 5 years. It’s not at all new.

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    • anzo@programming.dev ⁨3⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I am one of the lucky 10,000 today 😄

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  • dan@upvote.au ⁨13⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    This is a reason why you should actually read the Terms of Service and don’t use the product if you don’t agree with them. Niantic’s ability to use your images like this would have been in the ToS.

    AI has made this a bit easier since you can copy and paste the ToS into an LLM and ask it summarize the terms and point out the most important clauses.

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    • Scubus@sh.itjust.works ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      I used the AI to destroy the AI

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  • nucleative@lemmy.world ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I don’t automatically have a negative opinion about this, I would need more information before that. Did the terms of service allow for this?

    It’s a fascinating case study on crowdsourcing data that is useful to this navigation technology, and reminds me of the first captchas that helped train OCR engines.

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    • frongt@lemmy.zip ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Yeah this is like 90% of all of Google’s business model. Captchas to train OCR or tag crosswalks, vehicles, etc. for other computer vision. GOOG-411 to train voice recognition for the Google assistant.

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      • paraphrand@lemmy.world ⁨10⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        Google voice only makes sense as a data play too, for voicemail data.

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