Comment by saxonww
14 days ago
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.
Before smart phones or the rise of the internet your information was mined by credit agencies for use by banks, employers and other forms of credit lending.
Credit cards and Banks sold your data to third parties for marketing purposes.
Payroll companies like ADP also shared your data with the credit agencies.
This is not a new phenomenon and has been the currency of a number of industries for a while.
The only thing that has changed is the types of data collected. Personally, I think these older forms of data collection are quite a bit more insidious than some of the data mining done by a game like Niantic for some ml model.
I have a lot more control over and less insidious consequences from these types of data collection. I can avoid the game or service if I like. There isn't much I can do to prevent a credit agency from collecting my data.
> 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.
Every app you open on Mac sends a "ping" to Apples servers.
https://acecilia.medium.com/apple-is-sending-a-request-to-th....
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> 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).
Perhaps this is just my own brain's degradation, but how far removed from society do you need to be to expect your purchases to not be sold to the highest bidder? This practice is certainly older than I am.
Forgive me if I cannot conceive of a consumer who has completely tuned out the last forty years of discourse about consumer protection. Hell, the credit bureaus themselves contradict the concept of consumer privacy.
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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.
Wanting something to be a certain way is very different from believing that it is. And yes, I would expect any moderately informed and technically savvy user to assume that the company is doing anything they possibly can to profit off of user data.
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I want this, too. Desire is a very different concept than expectation.
> 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.
> In the US, people get very upset about things like traffic cameras, and public surveillance in general.
People get upset about a lot of things in the US. In fact—for some unknown reason we consider it a form of political activity to get upset over things. However, there is not any political party trying to court voters by advocating for dismantling the intelligence state.
GDPR is about personal information.
If they just keep the positional data and location information like the video gathered without linking them to a player, it’s perfectly fine.
> 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