Comment by relyks
13 days ago
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?
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But some numbers pusher somewhere saw an opportunity to make even more money and write good quarter number, padding themselves on the shoulder for a job welll done, without ever wasting a thought about any such unimportant thing as ethical implications...
Lots of people are spending a lot of money on in app purchases in these games already.
In this case it's the other way around. Pokemon Go is profitable and funds the rest of Niantic, this AI innitiative included (for now).
(I'm not saying that they shouldn't use the game data for training.)
> You were playing a game without paying for it.
I CALL BS. We paid ALL THE TIME! We pay even item's capacity so much they need to increase the limit recently[1].
Ref:
[1] https://www.facebook.com/PokemonGO/posts/1102918761192160
They won't. It's the same data collection play as every other Google project
Just for clarity on this comment and a separate one, Niantic is a Google spin out company and appears to still be majority shareholder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic,_Inc.#As_an_independen...
I kept wondering why a Google spinoff was named after a river and community in Connecticut, one of the least Googley locales in the country.
The connection is a ship, built in Connecticut, which brought gold rushers to San Francisco and was run aground and converted to a hotel there: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic_(whaling_vessel)
The company was named after the ship.
Google actually has released weights for some of their models, but judging by the fact that this model is potentially valuable, they likely will not allow Niantic for this
> Google actually has released weights for some of their models, but judging by the fact that this model is potentially valuable, they likely will not allow Niantic for this
which is totally unfair, every niantic player should have access to all the stuff because they collectively made it
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> 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.
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.
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.
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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.
We don't have to accept it no, but also you shouldn't be dumbfounded when it happens. Always assume everyone is doing it.
only a sith speaks in absolute. plenty of especially free AI products out there
Which are surely, totally not ingesting every iota of data they can get their hands on (legally or not, including your prompts) for training and the soon-to-be born “embedded ads”.
They're free because they're either gathering more data or trying to capture the market.
and who is funding them? how are they paying for their servers? a product can't be free, someone somewhere is paying for it. the main question is why are they paying for it.
No such thing as a free lunch.
All companies should be truthful, forthcoming, and specific about how they will use your data, but…
If you enjoy the game, play the game. Don’t boycott/withhold because they figured out an additional use for data that didn’t previously exist.
Another way of viewing this: GoogleMaps is incredibly high quality mapping software with lots of extra features. It is mostly free (for the end user). If no one uses it, Google doesn’t collect the data and nobody can benefit from the analysis of the data (eg. Traffic and ETA on Google Maps)
There’s no reason to hold out for a company to pay you for your geolocation data because none of them offer that service.
> All companies should be truthful, forthcoming, and specific about how they will use your data, but…
I'm fairly sure, if you read the terms-and-conditions, it probably said that the company owns this data and can do what they want with it.
> There’s no reason to hold out for a company to pay you for your geolocation data because none of them offer that service.
Well, it can make perfect sense (to some people) to hold out forever in that case.
> terms-and-conditions
I would argue that's being legally truthful, but not practically truthful. The company knows there are ways they can ensure their consumers are aware of the truth. And they know that burying it in Ts and Cs isn't one of them.
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> If you enjoy the game, play the game
I wish it were that simple but I think it's reasonable to hesitate. We don't know what these models are going to be used for. If by playing you're unwittingly letting something powerful fall into the wrong hands, maybe play something else.
(Generally speaking. I'm not trying to throw stones at Niantic specifically here.)
Were you really tricked? Hard to believe that someone on Hacker News saw Pokemon Go and didn't immediately think of the data collection possibilities.
It may surprise you to learn pokemon go is nearly a 10 year old game based on 40 year old beloved IP that when it was released did not exist in the same data hellscape we do today, and even if it did, the attraction of the IP would overrule people thinking about this kind of thing. These kinds of comments are extraordinarily disingenuous sounding, particularly when anyone can spend 3 seconds and figure out their primary market is literal children.
> [...] when it was released did not exist in the same data hellscape we do today [...]
That was fairly obvious at the time. And people used more or less exactly the same language to describe the world back then, too.
> These kinds of comments are extraordinarily disingenuous sounding, particularly when anyone can spend 3 seconds and figure out their primary market is literal children.
Poke Mongo was popular with people of all age groups, and (most) children have parents or other guardians to help them with these decisions.
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You've also been tricked into making your comment, which will undoubtedly be fed into an LLM's training corpus, and someone will be profiting off that, along with my comment as well. What a future we live in!
Baba booy bbaba booy Batman bats badly barring the baristers bearing.
Magic schoolbus!
Yea, take that llm model maker
If anything, it makes me sad that Google sat and watched OpenAI tarnish public recognition of AI, and meanwhile no one had figured out realistic digital persona reconstruction from Twitter logs applicable to arbitrary users. I've made so much of my "effort" into the Internet digital corpus with that purpose in mind!
Note to future digital me, do as I did 2007-2014. I approve.
NooooooooooOooOooOo!
Lol, do you really think that? I did it from having a desire to contribute to the conversation and I was aware that that would be a future possibility :) I'm not really getting much in return or being incentivized by Y combinator
I think the joke was that it's kind of the same with Pokemon GO. You play the game mainly because it's fun or lets you get some exercise in, so it's not really a bad thing that the company used the data to train a useful model. You're still having fun or doing exercise regardless of what they do with the data. Essentially, it's a positive externality: https://www.economicshelp.org/micro-economic-essays/marketfa...
But I think your point, if I understand it correctly, is that the in-game rewards kind of "hacked your brain" to do it, which is the part you're objecting to?
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I don't understand this perspective. Why should I resent the creation of value from behaviours that I would be doing anyway.
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You think that's bad, wait till you find out about what happens at work!
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Imagine how those of us who played Ingress (Niantic's first game) feel... We were tricked into contributing location data for the game we loved, only to see it reused for the far more popular (and profitable) Pokemon Go.
Why would anyone take issue with this? Asking as someone who tried both games at different points.
Niantic was always open with the fact that they gather location data, particularly in places cars can't go - I remember an early blog post saying as much before they were unbundled from Google. No one was tricked, they were just not paying attention.
I didn't feel tricked. Still don't.
They were pretty up-front about it bring a technology demo for a game engine they were building. It was obvious from the start that they would build future games on the same platform.
Right? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here and on Lemmy, the whole point of ingress was that it was made to sell Google mapping data and point of interest data, that's why the game didn't have monetizing practices for so long (of course it started having them once all the data was sold but hey)
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As long as they make enough money from Pokemon Go to sustain Ingress, I OK with that.
The Google - Niantic - Ingress - borg - kubernetes conspiracy must be unraveled
Do you honestly feel tricked that a gameplay mechanic which transparently asks you to record 50-100MB videos of a point-of-interest and upload it to their servers in exchange for an (often paid/premium) in-game reward was a form of data collection?
I don't think I've done any in PoGo (so I know it's very optional), but I've done plenty in Ingress, and I honestly don't see how it's possible to be surprised that it was contributing to something like this? It is hardly an intuitively native standalone gameplay mechanic in either game.
Oh yes, children, their primary market, definitely consider this. Definitely.
Most children have parents or other guardians.
They did at least published their research, and also dataset for 655 places:
https://research.nianticlabs.com/mapfree-reloc-benchmark
This was linked the news post (search for "data that we released").
> They consistently incentivize you to scan pokestops (physical locations) through "research tasks" and give you some useful items as rewards.
There are plenty of non-scan tasks you can do to get those rewards as well but I do think Poffins (largely useless unless you are grinding Best Buddies) are locked behind scan tasks.
Source: Me. This is the one topic I am very qualified to speak to on this website.
> and give you some useful items as rewards
Were you tricked, or were you just poorly compensated for your time?
Frankly given the numbers of hours of entertainment most people got out of Pokémon Go, I suspect this might be one of the cases where people have been best compensated for their data collection.
Friendships too!
Frankly, with the amount of real-world walking required to progress in Ingress and Pokémon Go, most players were compensated by the motivation to get a decent amount of exercise, which had a net positive impact on their health. Most exercise apps require users to pay subscriptions for the pleasure of using them.
One of the reasons i never played pokemon go is because there was no guarantee I didnt have my data sold.
I can't tell you why other people wouldn't think of this concern
> I have been tricked into working to contribute training data so that they can profit off my labor.
you werent tricked - your location data doesn't belong to you when you use the game.
I don't get why people somehow feel that they are entitled to the post-facto profit/value derived from the data that at the time they're willingly giving away before they "knew of" the potential value.
Weren't they pretty open about this being their business model?
Yeah, they did the same in Ingress: film a portal (pokéstop/gym) while walking around it to gain a small reward. I've always wondered what kind of dataset they were building with that -- now we know!
Now imagine how artists feel – and they didn’t even get any Pocket Monsters in return.
At some point can we agree that if we don't pay anything for something and we experience something fun, it's ok for the company to get something for investing millions of dollars in creating the experience for us in return?
If you weren't aware until now and were having fun is this outcome so bad? Did you have a work contract with this company to provide labor for wages and they didn't pay you? if not, then I don't think you can be upset that they are possibly profiting from your "labor".
Every time we visit a site that is free, which means 99.9% of all websites, that website bore a cost for our visit. Sometimes they show us ads which sometimes offsets the cost of creating the content and hosting it.
I am personally very glad with this arrangement. If a site is too ad filled, I just leave immediately.
With a game that is free and fun, I would be happy that I didn't have to pay anything and that the creator figured out a way for both parties to get something out of the deal. Isn't that a win-win situation?
Also, calling your experience "labor" when you were presumably having fun (if you weren't then why were you playing without expectation for payment in return?) is disingenuous.
At some point we need to be realistic about the world in which we live. Companies provide things for free or for money. If they provide something for "free", then we can't really expect to be compensated for our "labor" playing the game and that yes, the company is probably trying to figure out how to recoup their investment.
Honestly you should have assumed they were using the collected data for such a purpose. It would be shocking if they weren't doing this directly or selling the data to other companies to do this.
Assumed … or just read the Terms & Conditions / AUP like we did 10 years ago when they were using "Ingress" for location collection & tracking.
Please don't tell me you were just now realizing this
Did anyone here on hackernews not seriously assume this was the real reason for the existence of that game since day 1?
I'm not sure about the 'real reason'.
It's perhaps more like: some folks an Niantic wanted to make a Pokemon game, and this way they could make it financially viable?
As the old adage goes, "if you're not paying for the product, you ARE the product"...
It should just be "you ARE the product" giving that they don't care if you paid them or not.
“If you're not paying for the product, you are the product”
(I realize you can pay, but are not required to)
Nowadays you are the product either way unless you avoid pay via pirating.
The game is free, there has to be some way for them to profit, interesting to see this was it.
This wasn’t it. It was from gems
When ever it's free, it's all about the data.
I recall having a conversation circa 2004/5 with a colleague that Google was an AI company, not a search company.
Search is AI. Or would have been considered AI in eg the 1980s.
The goalposts of what counts as AI are constantly moving further and further away. Simple algorithms like A* once counted as part of AI.
My reaction, also.
"You used me... for LAND DEVELOPMENT! ...That wasn't very nice."
Well now by posting your thoughts to hn, you have been tricked yet again to give up free labor to train ai models.
But did you really scan the items they wanted? Most people in my local community scan their hands or the pavements around the pokestop. They have a great map of London pavements if they want to do it.
Really? You feel … tricked? Are you new around here??
I mean it was ultimately a research task
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