But you don’t understand! Some of those Charizards were shiny!
the same budget
How much did this it cost to collect all this data?
What cost? The data collectors paid us!
I feel like this was common knowledge back in 2016. Is this surprising to anyone?
Yeah I’ve known about this for like 5 years. It’s not at all new.
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.
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.
Definitely not Mandela, but maybe it’s something Google never officially confirmed.
Here’s an article about Ingress, the spiritual predecessor to PkmnGo. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628936-200-why-googles-ingress-game-is-a-data-gold-mine/
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.
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.
Hey! Whoa! That’s uncalled for!
…Goofy isn’t even a Pokemon.
Not even the first alarming issue with Pokemon Go
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.
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.
Google voice only makes sense as a data play too, for voicemail data, etc.
YouTube is a massive dataset. Part of their recent crackdowns on downloading tools and 3rd party apps is around keeping that data for themselves.
Nothing is free and everything will be stored.
AI already knows who you are online only the few can see those results but you bet your ass they are making machine generated profiles of you to sell ads.
Ephemeral communication is only way forward.
Hmm, what does ingress players train? AI for a civil war?
