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.
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.
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.
> I have done some preliminary tests: with a script (a small program) that standalone runs in 0.4 seconds, the extra network requests that Apple performs are taking that number to 6 seconds in average, and in some cases when my wifi is slow, 70 seconds.
I just do not believe that. It sounds like a bug in a beta release. I'm sure I would have noticed if every ls I run took 6 seconds, and I'm sure many others would have too. Heck, I've used a Mac with the network turned off and it sure doesn't just refuse to run everything.
> 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.
> 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.
It depends quite a bit on how you make your purchases.
If your purchases are on a credit card, with a loyalty ("tracking") card or App(TM) involved in the purchase? They're absolutely being sold to... well, probably not the highest bidder, but "all bidders with a valid payment account on file."
If you make a habit of paying cash for things and not using Apps or loyalty cards, and don't have your pocket beacon blaring loudly away on a range of radio frequencies when you shop, I expect a lot less data sales. It's a bit of a transition if you're used to credit cards, but once you're used to it, it's not bad at all, and involves a lot less data collection. I don't mind if the local barista or bartender knows me and my preferences, but I do mind if their POS system is uploading that data continuously.
Perhaps my main objection is that you said "Nothing in our society X" rather than "many things in our society Y."
I was just providing some counter-examples to show that there's more than nothing at play, here.
Certainly there are oodles of examples of our data being sold behind our backs, even well before 40 years ago. But there are also oodles of examples of the opposite.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> They charge for gems and this model is well understood to make a fortune without selling user data at all
I don't understand what this has to do with the topic at hand. Are you suggesting that people can't conceive of the sale of their data because they can conceive of whales amortizing the cost of their video games? That seems contradictory in your estimation of people's ability to grasp the world.
"How did you imagine they were making money without pimping your data?"
I imagined they were making money in the big obvious way they make money!
I can conceive of them selling user data, but it's not their core business model, and they would operate basically the same if they couldn't sell user data. It was never some obvious thing that they would do this.
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.
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...
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
> which is totally unfair, every niantic player should have access to all the stuff because they collectively made it
I don't understand this perspective. While all players may have collectively made this model possible, no individual player could make a model like it based on their contributions alone.
Since no single player could replicate this outcome based on only their data, does it not imply that there's value created from collecting (and incentivizing collection of) the data, and subsequently processing it to create something?
It actually seems more unfair to demand the collective result for yourself, when your own individual input is itself insufficient to have created it in the first place.
I don't think producers of data are inherently entitled to all products produced from said data.
Is a farmer entitled to the entirety of your work output because you ate a vegetable grown on their farm?
“Is a farmer entitled to the entirety of your work output because you ate a vegetable grown on their farm?”
Bad analogy. I pay a farmer (directly or indirectly) for the vegetable. It’s a simple, understood, transaction. These players were generally unaware that they were gathering data for Niantic in this way.
If data is crowdsourced it should belong to the crowd.
Niantic pays you for the data you collect, as well. It might pay you with in-game rewards, but if you accept those rewards, this is, as you put it, "a simple, understood transaction".
The farmers you buy the vegetables from are also generally unaware of how you use them, too!
I fail to see how you're differentiating the analogy from the original example.
Most of your analysis is flawed because the model is non-rivalrous so it could easily be given to every player.
Additionally, many people can contribute to make something greater that benefits everyone (see open source). So the argument of “you couldn’t have done this on your own” also doesn’t hold any water.
The only thing that protects niantic is just a shitty ToS like the rest of the games that nobody pays attention to. There is nothing fundamentally “right” about what they did.
> Most of your analysis is flawed because the model is non-rivalrous so it could easily be given to every player.
Sure, copying it is approximately free. But using it provides value, and sharing the model dilutes the value of its usage. The fact that it's free to copy doesn't mean it's free to share. The value of the copy that Niantic uses will be diluted by every copy they make and share with someone else.
> Additionally, many people can contribute to make something greater that benefits everyone (see open source). So the argument of “you couldn’t have done this on your own” also doesn’t hold any water.
Your second sentence does not logically follow from the first. In fact, your first sentence is an excellent example of the point I was making: many people contribute to open-source projects, and the value of the vast majority of those contributions on their own do not amount to the sum total value of the projects they've contributed to. This is what I meant by "your own individual input is itself insufficient to have created it in the first place". Sure, many people contribute to open source projects to make them what they are, but in the vast majority of cases, any individual contributor on their own would be unable to create those same projects.
To rephrase your first sentence: the value of the whole is greater than the value of the parts. There is value in putting all the pieces together in the right way, and that value should rightfully be allocated to those who did the synthesis, not to those who contributed the parts.
Is a canvas-maker entitled to every painting produced on one of their canvasses? Without the canvas the painting would not exist--but merely producing the canvas does not make it into a painting. The value is added by the artist, not the canvas-maker--therefore the value for the produced art should mostly go to the artist, not the canvas-maker. The canvas maker is compensated for the value of the canvas itself (which isn't much), and is entitled to nothing beyond.
> The only thing that protects niantic is just a shitty ToS like the rest of the games that nobody pays attention to. There is nothing fundamentally “right” about what they did.
There's also nothing fundamentally wrong about it, either, which was my point. Well, my point was actually that it's even more shitty to demand the sum total of the output when you only contributed a tiny slice of the input.
You’re getting really confused here. Nobody is arguing about stuff being worth more than the sum of its parts. That’s obvious to everyone who has watched literally anything useful being constructed out of materials.
You using that as some kind of support for Niantic’s actions doesn’t make any sense.
> There's also nothing fundamentally wrong about it, either, which was my point.
What you’re ignoring is the reality of people getting angry when they contribute something under a premise and then it gets used for something else. When I contribute to a charity that is supposed to build water supply systems and they decide to build pipe bombs instead, I’m gonna be pretty pissed off.
> Well, my point was actually that it's even more shitty to demand the sum total of the output when you only contributed a tiny slice of the input.
The collective that produced literally all of the input can ask for the model and then easily copy it to each member. If a single person produced all of the input and then requested this, how much does your argument change? Because these scenarios are equivalent when the product isn’t rivalrous.
More generally, you’re still not grokking non-rivalrous goods. A good isn’t non-rivalrous just because artificially constraining it and selling access to it can make it profitable. This confusion has led you multiple times to comparing this model to physical goods.
> You’re getting really confused here. Nobody is arguing about stuff being worth more than the sum of its parts. That’s obvious to everyone who has watched literally anything useful being constructed out of materials.
I really don't think I'm getting confused here. This is what you said: "Additionally, many people can contribute to make something greater that benefits everyone (see open source)". That sounds to me like "many people contribute to make a thing whose value is greater than the value of the inputs" aka "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts".
Regardless, your second sentence was still unsupported by that, because I can point to literally any open-source project and prove that no one contributor to that project could have created the project that exists today. Sure, there are projects where 80-90% of the project is written by one person, and even the rare case where an entire project is written by a single individual, but those are rare cases, and not the norm. The statement that "no one individual could recreate these projects on their own" is still accurate far more often than it's not. Finding a single counter-example doesn't prove the point, because your counterexample is the vast minority case.
We know for a fact in the case of Niantic's data gathering that no one individual could have made this model. There are many reasons, but the easiest to illustrate is the number of man-hours required to collect the input data.
> What you’re ignoring is the reality of people getting angry when they contribute something under a premise and then it gets used for something else. When I contribute to a charity that is supposed to build water supply systems and they decide to build pipe bombs instead, I’m gonna be pretty pissed off.
I'm not ignoring that reality, I'm just saying those people aren't justified in their anger. They can be angry all they want, but anger does not justify feeling entitled to something to which you really aren't. In the case of Niantic's data collection, they opted into this and agreed to collect the data on behalf of Niantic, without even asking what the data was to be used for. When it turns out that it's in purpose of something to make Niantic money (you know, to make up for the fact that you're playing their game for free), they really have no standing. To be clear, they're free to be angry and free to feel "cheated" in some way, but a) they haven't been cheated, and b) their ignorance is their fault and no one else's.
> The collective that produced literally all of the input can ask for the model and then easily copy it to each member. If a single person produced all of the input and then requested this, how much does your argument change? Because these scenarios are equivalent when the product isn’t rivalrous.
If a single person produced all the input and then requested it, I'd probably say they deserve a copy. However, no single individual can have produced all the input here, so the point is moot. There also is no "collective that produced literally all of the input", so that point is moot, as well. You would never be able to get every person's explicit consent to demand a copy of the model on behalf of "everyone", if not for the simple fact that the vast majority of those people simply don't give a shit. They'd never use the model or do anything constructive with it, so why bother with having a copy?
Neither of these examples are realistic, and so my argument doesn't change. I try to keep my arguments grounded in reality, not in hypotheticals.
And again, giving a copy to each member isn't free, even though copying it might be. I'll just quote myself again:
> Sure, copying it is approximately free. But using it provides value, and sharing the model dilutes the value of its usage. The fact that it's free to copy doesn't mean it's free to share. The value of the copy that Niantic uses will be diluted by every copy they make and share with someone else. [...] There is value in putting all the pieces together in the right way, and that value should rightfully be allocated to those who did the synthesis, not to those who contributed the parts.
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> More generally, you’re still not grokking non-rivalrous goods. A good isn’t non-rivalrous just because artificially constraining it and selling access to it can make it profitable. This confusion has led you multiple times to comparing this model to physical goods.
No, I grok non-rivalrous goods pretty well. I just think they're largely imaginary and only apply to a very small slice of non-physical goods. Niantic is building this model to make money from it. This means they believe the model will provide value to other users, who will pay them for the use of that model. Anyone else who obtains a copy of this model could use it in the same way, and obtain some of that market share for themselves. This means providing services built on this model is inherently rivalrous, which removes the entire basis of your argument. Even if this leads to lower prices for the end users (the ideal case), there is still direct competition (i.e. rivalry!) between all owners of the model.
People who think like this and want to profit off you with KPIs is why players should always maliciously comply with data grabs. Spend the 30 seconds activating the accelerometer and doing sweeps of your shoes and full finger covers of the surroundings to get those poffins and rare candies. It's gross that lately they want to give me 10 pokeballs now instead.
If some small number maliciously comply like this, it will make the model better, not worse.
This is also wildly antisocial behavior, and if everyone behaved like this, the world would be a really shit place. I know many people have a genuine "fuck you, I got mine" attitude, but if everyone had it, the world would be infinitely worse off.
If you don't like the terms of the game, don't play it? Why does dislike of the terms merit what essentially amounts to cheating (under the spirit of the rules, if not the letter)? This attitude makes even less sense than the one I was originally critiquing
What you say is fair but if an individual's data doesn't matter, what happens when they ask to have their data deleted under GDPR.
is there a way to demux their data from existing models?
While your example isn't exactly coherent (I don't think GDPR would cover photos/videos taken by the user, unless maybe the user was in the photo/video?), presumably they could just train the model again without that user's data. I doubt the end result would be that much different
> Is a farmer entitled to the entirety of your work output because you ate a vegetable grown on their farm?
This is more like paying the farmhands.
If we're looking at my work output, eh, everyone that works on a copyrighted thing gets a personal license to it? That sounds like it would work out okay.
> I don't think producers of data are inherently entitled to all products produced from said data.
It depends on how directly the data is tied to the output. This seems pretty direct.
Niantic was clear about the product of the labor: In exchange for swiping the PokeStop, you'd get the rewards. No one was ever told they'd get more than that, and no one had any reasonable expectation that they'd get more.
Exactly! Everyone thought that the exchange was them doing something in the game, and Niantic was giving them the rewards in the game, and no one had any reasonable expectation that Niantic would get more outside of the game. (After all, neither Blizzard or Square get anything when one completes quest objectives in their MMO.)
So obviously, now that Niantic is getting things outside the game its reasonable the people who did the work ask for something from that.
> So obviously, now that Niantic is getting things outside the game its reasonable the people who did the work ask for something from that.
Absolutely not.
If you are compensated for doing something, you can’t suddenly come back for more 5 years later because it was used as part of something bigger which is now making money.
I have little sympathy for the players here. If you are voluntarily doing free work for worthless virtual things, you can’t come complaining when it dawns on you that it might have been dumb from the start (and to be fair maybe it wasn’t and they did it because it was fun which is completely ok).
I guess we could ban in game shop and game reward for real work as they are somehow predatory but that would be a bit paternalistic.
Can you name any other agreement where it's considered reasonable to renegotiate the terms afterwards because you found out what the other party got was more profitable for them than you'd been aware of, through no misrepresentation on their part?
For people who've dealt with children a lot, sure. But making an exchange and then expecting a cut of the other side's profits on top of what you exchanged for is possibly the definition of unreasonable expectations.
> I don't think this is very difficult to sort out: people feel entitled to the products of their labor.
What labor, though? They took a few pictures and videos (hell, they probably still have a copy of them, so giving a copy to Niantic is essentially free), and were generally compensated for doing that (through in-game rewards, but compensated nonetheless).
The "labor" that transformed the many players' many bits of data was done by Niantic, and thus I would argue that Niantic is the rightful beneficiary of any value that could not be generated by any individual player. To my earlier point, every player could retain a copy of every photo/video they submitted to Niantic, and still be unable to produce this model from it.
> This is comparing apples and oranges: presumably the consumer didn't do anything to produce the vegetable. Hell if anything, under this analogy niantic would owe users a portion of their profits.
The players are also compensated for their submissions, are they not? It doesn't matter that it's not with "real money", in-game rewards are still compensation.
If you agree that a farmer is not entitled to any (much less all!) of your work output because they contributed to feeding you, you agree that the players are not entitled to the models produced by Niantic.
Maybe I'd accept the argument that a player might be entitled to the model generated by training on _only_ that player's data, but I think we'd agree that would be a pretty worthless model.
The value comes from the work Niantic put in to collate the data and build the model. Someone who contributed a tiny fragment of the training data isn't entitled to any of that added value (much less all of it, as the OP was seeming to demand), just like a farmer isn't entitled to any of your work output (much less all of it!) by contributing a fragment of your caloric intake.
They got to play the game for free, and I'm fairly sure what Google is doing here is within the terms and conditions that people agreed to.
(And I don't even mean only that it complies with the exact wording of the fine print that nobody reads anyway, but also that everyone expects the terms-and-conditions to say that the company owns all the data. So no surprises to anyone.)
Welcome to the modern internet. While you're at it, please get me access to
Google's captcha models
facebook face directory
Google's GPS location data hoard, (most every android phone on the planet 24/7 (!) and any iPhone navigating with gmaps)
And so on and so on
All of which I've directly contributed to and never (directly) recieved anything in return
> All of which I've directly contributed to and never (directly) recieved anything in return
To be fair, you received a service for free that you may have otherwise had to pay for. I'm not saying it's just, but to say you didn't get anything in return is disingenuous.
Agreed. I mostly meant that I'll never see the actual dataset that I contributed to. That's why I'd prefer to spend my time on things that I can see, like OpenStreetMap :)
While you weren't paying for it with currency, the service is most certainly not "free". There's still a transaction happening when you use the service, albeit a transaction the service provider refuses to acknowledge outside the terms of service.
Not saying you are saying this but it amused me how many people believe(d) that Apple wasn’t mining and hoarding location data either because well, they’re Apple and they love you. All those traffic statuses in Apple Maps on minor side streets with no monitoring came from the … traffic fairy, perhaps.
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.
Of course there was consent. There is even an explicit EULA listing in plain writing that you are actually collecting data for them that people have to agree to before playing.
That people suddenly wake up to the fact that they were dumb for providing labour for worthless virtual gifts doesn't magically allow them to claim it was abuse post-fact.
If people don’t read or understand the EULA, then it violates the spirit of the legislation (not to mention it’s plain shady). Consent must be voluntary (opt-in) and informed.
You can spin this both ways. So if I include a 12,000 page EULA with my product, you're the idiot if page 8,172 includes a footnote that allows me to sell your data, but uses terms defined a few thousand pages earlier, so you actually have to read all of it?
You can play these shenanigans with businesses, but I for one am happy such behaviour is illegal here when selling to consumers.
I absolutely agree with you that this should not be the norm. The fact is that "they" absolutely do it and even give you "rewards" for your behaviour and actions in the free game. Reminds me of a certain opiod crisis, but now it is combining software with the human phyche almost directly.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
I'm inclined to agree with your distinction in general. But not in this particular case:
Everybody knows, even without actually bothering to read the terms-and-conditions, that they will say that the company owns all the data. Letter and spirit agree.
In some sense reading the the T&Cs might actually be detrimental to your understanding: you might misinterpret the carefully lawyered language to conclude that there are certain limits to what the company can do with your data. But they are probably way better than you at interpreting legal terms they crafted themselves.
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.)
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.
I believe Google explicitly stated that they used data collected from Ingress (arguably a predecessor to Pokemon Go) at the time. It's the reason Niantic was founded. It's hard to take these complaints seriously.
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!
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.
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?
I think that's part of it-
but another part is a lot of people do not like what Gen AI is doing and are offended that what was a fun game is now part of that project.
Like when captchas were for making old books readable it felt a lot more friendly than now where its all driverless car nonsense
Because the goal is to replace you with a machine and to widen the poverty gap. Also because I do not consent to it.
Are you also fine with taking pictures of pretty women on the street (hey, they'd be walking there anyway) and posting them online and farming ad revenue? Or training a model on their likeness for porn?
Every major website including Reddit and Imgur have TOS language saying they can do basically anything they want with content you add to their platforms, including AI training
Sure, what does that have to do with third parties scraping shit and training their models on it? Which is exactly how these ai bros started their empire? These terms of services were updated after the genie was out of the bottle. Claiming otherwise is revisionist.
is a webcam of Times Square, and they've got ads on the page, and they're making money off pictures of pretty men and women on that street. I don't know how okay or not I am with it, but it's the world we live in.
tbh I don't think its a bad argument. There's plenty of things I'd do to be nice to a fellow person that I would Not do for the benefit of a large company.
What they're doing is (IMO) evil and anti-human and I do not want to be part of it
Because AI is going to create a world where only a few hundred trillionaires and a few thousand billionaires exist while everyone else is in desperate poverty.
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.
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)
I'm with you and the previous commenter. People who feel "tricked" we're only fooled by their own blindness. Sorry, but then trying to garner sympathy for that is like being asked to feel bad for the stripper that takes her clothes off for money; they both 100% knew what they were getting into and no other reasonable expectations can be had from engaging in that situation.
Facebook has been around something like a decade, now? I forget the exact number, but it's been long enough that everyone should have learned their lesson at this point; if you are creating data, be it personal, geospatial or otherwise, by using a product expect that data to be used as a commodity by the makes of said product.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
