‘Pokémon Go’ players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30 billion images
www.popsci.com
The massive crowdsourcing effort could use real-world to help robots deliver pizza.
  • LillyPip@lemmy.caEnglish
    744·
    23 days ago

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

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

    In this case, it was mostly children’s data.

    • TheTechnician27@lemmy.worldEnglish
      332·
      23 days 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 without that context 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.

      Edit: Moreover, an arguably worse problem with this saying in 2026 is that it implies (doesn’t outright state, but implies to an uninformed reader) that paid services can save them from this, which these days is almost universally untrue.

      • LillyPip@lemmy.caEnglish
        11·
        23 days ago

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

      • redhat421@lemmy.worldEnglish
        41·
        22 days 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.

      • LillyPip@lemmy.caEnglish
        102·
        23 days ago

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

    • pHr34kY@lemmy.worldEnglish
      23·
      23 days 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.

    • dhork@lemmy.worldEnglish
      361·
      23 days ago

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

      • Euphoma@lemmy.mlEnglish
        41·
        22 days ago

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

  • ch00f@lemmy.worldEnglish
    231·
    23 days ago

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

    • TechLich@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      22 days 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.

  • Flipper@feddit.orgEnglish
    20·
    22 days 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.

    • CatZoomies@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      22 days 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 I 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.

  • nucleative@lemmy.worldEnglish
    4·
    23 days 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.