Unsarcastically, a lot of people believe user data belongs to users, and that they should have a say in how it's used. Here, I think the point is that Niantic decided they could use the data this way and weren't transparent about it until it was already done. I'm sure I would be in the minority, but I would never have played - or never have done certain things like the research tasks - had I known I was training an AI model.
I'm sure the Po:Go EULA that no one reads has blanket grants saying "you agree that we can do whatever we want," so I can't complain too hard, but still disappointed I spent any time in that game.
> Nothing in our society operates in a way that might imply this.
I beg your pardon?
Consider just about any physical belonging — say, a book. When I buy a book, it belongs to me. When I read a book in my home, I expect it to be a private experience (nobody data-mining my eyeball movements, for example).
This applies to all sorts of things. Even electronic things — if I put some files on a USB stick I expect them to be "mine" and used as I please, not uploaded to the cloud behind my back, or similar.
And if we're just limiting ourselves to what we do in public (eg: collecting pokemon or whatever), it's still normal, I think, to interact relatively anonymously with the world. You don't expect people to remember you after meeting them once, for example.
In summary, I'd say that "things in our society" very much include people (and their tendency to forget or not care about you), and physical non-smart objects. Smart phones and devices that do track your every move and do remember everything are the exception, not the rule.
You find it strange that people want something different than the wild west status quo (which is not the status quo everywhere, btw) that they may not even fully understand or be informed enough to understand how it works or what the consequences are? like you actually expect even a savvy user of this game to be like ‘oh, of course they would be using my labor to profit for this technology i dont understand, duh?’ what a strange statement and world view.
Media just buries people in bad examples, and they don't notice the rest of the world. If you read about someone driving over 5 grannies, but still don't follow that example, certainly you can't say that “everyone is doing it”.
Despite what success fantasies and other self-help garbage teach people, a lot of society — most of it, actually — does not work on greed. That you can ignore thinking about it is itself a statement about deep foundations under the shallow bling.
Off the top of my head I think GDPR in the EU might have something to say about this. I don't know if those protections exist anywhere else or not.
In the US, people get very upset about things like traffic cameras, and public surveillance in general. Those are usually data-for-punishment vs. data-for-profit (...maybe?), but people here resist things like data recorders in their cars to lower car insurance.
At least to me, being unhappy about Niantic's behavior here does not seem the least bit unusual.
> I can understand that people believe this, but why do they do? Nothing in our society operates in a way that might imply this.
Sure, but that disconnect between what people think and how things work is almost fully general over all subjects.
I've seen people (behave as if they) think translation is just the words, but that leads to "hydraulic ram" becoming "water sheep". People who want antibiotics for viral infections, or who refuse vaccines (covid and other) claiming they're "untested" or have "side effects" while promoting alternatives that both failed testing and have known side effects. I've seen people speak as if government taxation only exists because the guy in charge of taxes is, personally, greedy. I've heard anecdotes of people saying that you can get people to follow the rules by saying "first rule is to always follow the rules" and directly seen people talk as if banning something is sufficient to make it stop.
The idea that it's even possible to do make a model like this from the user data, is probably mind-blowing to a lot of people.
The naïve assumption most people seem to have is that computers do only what they, personally as end-users, tell them to do, and that they're as slow as the ad-riddled web front-end with needlessly slow transition animations placed there to keep user engagement high — rather than the truth, that software primarily does what the operator of the service wants it to do, and that it's absolutely possible for a home PC[0] to hold and query a database of all 8 billion people on the planet and the two trillion or so different personal relationships between them.
When GenAI images were new, some of the artists communities said "That content generated can reference hundreds, even thousands of pieces of work from other artists to create derivative images"[1], rather than millions of images, because the scale of computer performance is far beyond the comprehension of the average person. The fact that the average single image contributes so little to any given model that it can't even represent its own filename, even moreso.
And so it is with stuff like this: what can be done, cannot be comprehended by the people who, theoretically, gave consent that their data be used in that way.
[0] Of course, these days most people don't have home PCs; phone, perhaps a tablet, they may have a small low performance media server if they're fancy, but what we here would think of as a PC is to all that as a Ferrari etc. is to a Honda Civic.
>>>>> I have been tricked into working to contribute training data so that they can profit off my labor.
> Unsarcastically, a lot of people believe user data belongs to users, and that they should have a say in how it's used.
At some point this stops being a fair complaint, though. Most of the AI-related cases IMO are such.
To put it bluntly: expecting to be compensated for anything that can be framed as one's labor is such an extreme level of greed that even Scrooge McDuck would be ashamed of. In fact, trying to capture all value one generates, is at the root of most if not all underhanded or downright immoral business practices in companies both large and small.
The way society works best, is when people stop trying to catch all the value they generate. That surplus is what others can use to contribute to the whole, and then you can use some of their uncaptured value, and so on. That's how symbiotic relationships form; that's how ecosystems work.
> I'm sure I would be in the minority, but I would never have played - or never have done certain things like the research tasks - had I known I was training an AI model.
I have a feeling you wouldn't be in minority here, at least not among people with any kind of view on this.
Still, with AI stuff, anyone's fair share is $0, because that's how much anyone's data is worth on the margin.
It's also deeply ironic that nobody cares when people's data is being used to screw them over directly - such as profiling or targeting ads; but the moment someone figures out how to monetize this data in a way that doesn't screw over the source, suddenly everyone is up in arms, because they aren't getting their "fair share".
Depend on normal users' feelings, I'm sure when I play Switch, they won't sell my data. But when people use Google's service, this is the default setting .
The normal business model for free to play games is that a small number of people pay a lot of money for cosmetics or convenience, this finances the game and is how the company makes its money. The free players then provide value by being there making the game feel alive and being someone, the spenders can show off their cool items to.
That is how monetization for free to play games have worked for a very long time now. Changing that without letting people know up front is absolutely a betrayal of trust.
I'm not a fan of the way you moved the goal posts here. You argued that Niantic would obviously use user data to fund game operations. Then we see that they don't actually need to do that, and that the game could fund itself. Then you argue that well, we shouldn't assume that they wouldn't try to monetize user data, shame on us. I agree that those who know how tech companies operate should be extremely pessimistic as to how users are treated, but I don't think that pessimism has permeated the public consciousness to quite the level you think it has. Moreover, I don't think it's a failing on the part of the user to assume that a company would do something in their best interest. It's a failing of the company to treat users as commodities whose only value is to be sold.
Sarcastically, no one should.
Unsarcastically, a lot of people believe user data belongs to users, and that they should have a say in how it's used. Here, I think the point is that Niantic decided they could use the data this way and weren't transparent about it until it was already done. I'm sure I would be in the minority, but I would never have played - or never have done certain things like the research tasks - had I known I was training an AI model.
I'm sure the Po:Go EULA that no one reads has blanket grants saying "you agree that we can do whatever we want," so I can't complain too hard, but still disappointed I spent any time in that game.
> Unsarcastically, a lot of people believe user data belongs to users, and that they should have a say in how it's used
I can understand that people believe this, but why do they do? Nothing in our society operates in a way that might imply this.
> Nothing in our society operates in a way that might imply this.
I beg your pardon?
Consider just about any physical belonging — say, a book. When I buy a book, it belongs to me. When I read a book in my home, I expect it to be a private experience (nobody data-mining my eyeball movements, for example).
This applies to all sorts of things. Even electronic things — if I put some files on a USB stick I expect them to be "mine" and used as I please, not uploaded to the cloud behind my back, or similar.
And if we're just limiting ourselves to what we do in public (eg: collecting pokemon or whatever), it's still normal, I think, to interact relatively anonymously with the world. You don't expect people to remember you after meeting them once, for example.
In summary, I'd say that "things in our society" very much include people (and their tendency to forget or not care about you), and physical non-smart objects. Smart phones and devices that do track your every move and do remember everything are the exception, not the rule.
7 replies →
You find it strange that people want something different than the wild west status quo (which is not the status quo everywhere, btw) that they may not even fully understand or be informed enough to understand how it works or what the consequences are? like you actually expect even a savvy user of this game to be like ‘oh, of course they would be using my labor to profit for this technology i dont understand, duh?’ what a strange statement and world view.
4 replies →
> Nothing in our society operates in a way that might imply this.
<insert obnoxious EU-akshually>
Media just buries people in bad examples, and they don't notice the rest of the world. If you read about someone driving over 5 grannies, but still don't follow that example, certainly you can't say that “everyone is doing it”.
Despite what success fantasies and other self-help garbage teach people, a lot of society — most of it, actually — does not work on greed. That you can ignore thinking about it is itself a statement about deep foundations under the shallow bling.
Is that true?
Off the top of my head I think GDPR in the EU might have something to say about this. I don't know if those protections exist anywhere else or not.
In the US, people get very upset about things like traffic cameras, and public surveillance in general. Those are usually data-for-punishment vs. data-for-profit (...maybe?), but people here resist things like data recorders in their cars to lower car insurance.
At least to me, being unhappy about Niantic's behavior here does not seem the least bit unusual.
2 replies →
> I can understand that people believe this, but why do they do? Nothing in our society operates in a way that might imply this.
Sure, but that disconnect between what people think and how things work is almost fully general over all subjects.
I've seen people (behave as if they) think translation is just the words, but that leads to "hydraulic ram" becoming "water sheep". People who want antibiotics for viral infections, or who refuse vaccines (covid and other) claiming they're "untested" or have "side effects" while promoting alternatives that both failed testing and have known side effects. I've seen people speak as if government taxation only exists because the guy in charge of taxes is, personally, greedy. I've heard anecdotes of people saying that you can get people to follow the rules by saying "first rule is to always follow the rules" and directly seen people talk as if banning something is sufficient to make it stop.
The idea that it's even possible to do make a model like this from the user data, is probably mind-blowing to a lot of people.
The naïve assumption most people seem to have is that computers do only what they, personally as end-users, tell them to do, and that they're as slow as the ad-riddled web front-end with needlessly slow transition animations placed there to keep user engagement high — rather than the truth, that software primarily does what the operator of the service wants it to do, and that it's absolutely possible for a home PC[0] to hold and query a database of all 8 billion people on the planet and the two trillion or so different personal relationships between them.
When GenAI images were new, some of the artists communities said "That content generated can reference hundreds, even thousands of pieces of work from other artists to create derivative images"[1], rather than millions of images, because the scale of computer performance is far beyond the comprehension of the average person. The fact that the average single image contributes so little to any given model that it can't even represent its own filename, even moreso.
And so it is with stuff like this: what can be done, cannot be comprehended by the people who, theoretically, gave consent that their data be used in that way.
[0] Of course, these days most people don't have home PCs; phone, perhaps a tablet, they may have a small low performance media server if they're fancy, but what we here would think of as a PC is to all that as a Ferrari etc. is to a Honda Civic.
[0] https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/10321622
>>>>> I have been tricked into working to contribute training data so that they can profit off my labor.
> Unsarcastically, a lot of people believe user data belongs to users, and that they should have a say in how it's used.
At some point this stops being a fair complaint, though. Most of the AI-related cases IMO are such.
To put it bluntly: expecting to be compensated for anything that can be framed as one's labor is such an extreme level of greed that even Scrooge McDuck would be ashamed of. In fact, trying to capture all value one generates, is at the root of most if not all underhanded or downright immoral business practices in companies both large and small.
The way society works best, is when people stop trying to catch all the value they generate. That surplus is what others can use to contribute to the whole, and then you can use some of their uncaptured value, and so on. That's how symbiotic relationships form; that's how ecosystems work.
> I'm sure I would be in the minority, but I would never have played - or never have done certain things like the research tasks - had I known I was training an AI model.
I have a feeling you wouldn't be in minority here, at least not among people with any kind of view on this.
Still, with AI stuff, anyone's fair share is $0, because that's how much anyone's data is worth on the margin.
It's also deeply ironic that nobody cares when people's data is being used to screw them over directly - such as profiling or targeting ads; but the moment someone figures out how to monetize this data in a way that doesn't screw over the source, suddenly everyone is up in arms, because they aren't getting their "fair share".
there should be a legal framework for data is protected. until then this is what we get
Maybe they trust Pokemon as a IP? Usually Nintendo keeps your data safe.
Is this model not a safe use of the data?
Well, if it's being used for "military" purposes, it's sure not safe for someone!
It’s on niantic to prove that it is, not for the millions of unspecting users to prove it isn’t.
Depend on normal users' feelings, I'm sure when I play Switch, they won't sell my data. But when people use Google's service, this is the default setting .
Because not everyone is a seasoned IT professional.
I don't think you need to be an "IT professional" to understand that not paying money doesn't imply that you aren't giving away value.
The normal business model for free to play games is that a small number of people pay a lot of money for cosmetics or convenience, this finances the game and is how the company makes its money. The free players then provide value by being there making the game feel alive and being someone, the spenders can show off their cool items to.
That is how monetization for free to play games have worked for a very long time now. Changing that without letting people know up front is absolutely a betrayal of trust.
I would hazard a guess that the vast majority of the people playing Pokemon Go have never even considered the question.
This is disingenuous. They charge for gems and this model is well understood to make a fortune without selling user data at all
2 replies →
It might even go further than that - I'd say the typical person is more suspicious of free open-source software than the typical "IT professional".
Almost nobody would care about this issue even if they knew it was being done.
I'm not a fan of the way you moved the goal posts here. You argued that Niantic would obviously use user data to fund game operations. Then we see that they don't actually need to do that, and that the game could fund itself. Then you argue that well, we shouldn't assume that they wouldn't try to monetize user data, shame on us. I agree that those who know how tech companies operate should be extremely pessimistic as to how users are treated, but I don't think that pessimism has permeated the public consciousness to quite the level you think it has. Moreover, I don't think it's a failing on the part of the user to assume that a company would do something in their best interest. It's a failing of the company to treat users as commodities whose only value is to be sold.