I wouldn't say "unknowingly" since stories like [0] have been posted for years/decades and people were given "free" internet (data) to play the game [1] . It's more that people just didn't give a shit.
I'm sure there are new details about the usecases for the data, but not that data was collected unknowingly
I like Pokemon Go and play almost every day. I did this scan one time and then stopped. The rewards are not worth the hassle. I don't think many players are doing it. It's just very weird to stand somewhere and scan an object.
I also wouldn't say 'unknowingly trained', it's pretty obvious what it does, and I think the game even tells you that they want to understands how the POI looks like in 3D.
I used to just record the ground and even leave out my feet, but apparently they detect and ban people who do this too often now. The data was always going somewhere shady, but after the sale it is even worse so I just stopped completely. At best you get a poffin or rare candy and that absolutely is not worth it.
> obvious what it does, and I think the game even tells you that they want to understands how the POI looks like in 3D.
But most people probably assumed the purpose was to improve the game, not to train delivery robots.
Or whatever else they end up doing with the data. If, as the article suggests, this ends up adding to the surveillance state by making geolocation of photos more accurate, then I really don't think that's what the players had in mind.
At what point will we have people transmit their car dash cams along with GPS information in order to generate more data? I’m actually surprised this hasn’t happened yet with self driving car manufacturers needing more and more data
Yes. You had to enable AR scans, follow the prompts that tried to ensure they were quality (although lots of people just scanned the ground), then click a big green upload button. When completed, you were compensated with in-game items.
I think it was quite obvious they were harvesting data although lesser technical players maybe weren't.
What's less obvious is the fact they record all your location data for who-knows-what purposes.
My friend plays Pokémon Go for hours every day while walking his dog. I asked him about this and now we’re both confused. The in game scanning is only for major landmarks in the game. Even in his dense city these landmarks are few and far between. The world model would only have sparse information in the area immediately surrounding these landmarks.
I don’t know if there’s much substance to the delivery robot story. This could be a journalist trying to make the story relatable.
Big corporations have found the way to make us work for free in their own terms. The balance of power between the working class and capital is totally broken.
And for me it is not just the lack of transparency. It is the power balance. I should not need to work for free, give my data, and god knows what to play a game. I should not be living knowing that I am being exploited at each interaction with software. Transparency is good, but not enough. "Click here to accept" and thousands of lines of legalese do not create a fair society.
You don't need to work and if you do you get rewarded in the game. Money is not the only motivating factor for people. Even something like keeping Google Map up to date can bring value to people from helping others. Helping others is not zero sum. Just because a company benefits from helping others that doesn't mean it's bad.
> Big corporations have found the way to make us work for free in their own terms. The balance of power between the working class and capital is totally broken.
> And for me it is not just the lack of transparency. It is the power balance. I should not need to work for free, give my data, and god knows what to play a game.
If you have such a (legitimate) stance, why don't you delete Pokémon Go (and Ingress) as fast as possible from your mobile phone and encourage other people to do the same?
It was obvious from begin that the whole purpose of the game was that naive players are to take pictures of objects that are of interest to Niantic for free. The "payment" is a short dosis of dopamine high. A lot of players seemed to be perfectly fine with this kind of "payment".
> If you have such a (legitimate) stance, why don't you delete Pokémon Go (and Ingress) as fast as possible from your mobile phone and encourage other people to do the same?
I'm encouraging people to regulate big corporations. Fighting individually against corporations larger than countries makes no logical sense. What you are asking me is to follow a losing strategy.
> It was obvious from begin that the whole purpose of the game was that naive players are to take pictures of objects that are of interest to Niantic for free.
Even if a scam is obvious, it is still a scam and needs to be stop by the rule of law.
I didn't know, although I play Pokemon Go and the Wikipedia page for them doesn't say big data although it mentions "...been developing for years: the Niantic Real World Platform." as mentioned in the article although it sounds a bit of a work in progress. They make a lot of money as a games company.
Niantic are a number of people who are doing this. Its not that clear from the article, but niantic spatial are using the images captured from users to create a 3d model of "THE WORLD" or where people play pokemon go.
They have then fed that data into a more modern version of colmap (https://github.com/colmap/colmap) to create a point cloud. Then the engineering to make sure that point cloud is aligned accurately and automatically.
Once you have that point cloud aligned to the world, all you need is another image with some overlapping feature. Using simple trigonometry you can work out where the camera is from one picture
This is largely trivial to do for a few 100 sqaure meters. the hard part is doing it fast in at the city scale. Extracting a few thousand features from an image and then matching them against >billion other points is hard to do quickly, without some optimisations.
The thing that is not mentioned here is that data freshness is actually more important. Building change (advertising hoardings, paint jobs, logo changes, building remodelled etc) so the data goes stale. Its actually not that expensive anymore to just send your own people to scan areas. (A number of startups pre 2020 did it, mapillary provides a platform for it, although now owned by facebook)
The robots will be feeding that data back in to the map. the special sauce is updating the map without infringing patents, and doing it efficiently.
I don't think anyone actually cares about this in principle. This is more of a product and marketing problem than a legal or moral one.
What people dislike is noticing the strings attached so distastefully. I can't think of any fads or pastimes where there aren't any, but the benefits of the activity offered should outweigh the cost.
In that sense, Pokémon Go was a bad deal. I still don't get what was ever in it for the player.
Not unexpected, but it looks the oldest kid, Ingress, is being ignored again. IIRC, there was some badge you could earn by doing a number of those scans.
47 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 68.4 ms ] thread[0] https://auth0.com/blog/2016/07/11/pokemon-go-catches-all-you... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12075477
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/7/14/12192752/t-mobile-pokemon... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12099159
I also wouldn't say 'unknowingly trained', it's pretty obvious what it does, and I think the game even tells you that they want to understands how the POI looks like in 3D.
Do we have to think? Apparently they amassed 30B images. :)
But most people probably assumed the purpose was to improve the game, not to train delivery robots.
Or whatever else they end up doing with the data. If, as the article suggests, this ends up adding to the surveillance state by making geolocation of photos more accurate, then I really don't think that's what the players had in mind.
Huh? Does popsci not have copy editors?
> Whether players knew it or not, those scans were creating 3D models of the real world
Kind of shitty reporting. Did users know about this data collection or not? Was it not disclosed?
I think it was quite obvious they were harvesting data although lesser technical players maybe weren't.
What's less obvious is the fact they record all your location data for who-knows-what purposes.
It's useful to map the world, this is what Google / Baidu / Yandex Maps are doing too.
I don’t know if there’s much substance to the delivery robot story. This could be a journalist trying to make the story relatable.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoad/comments/8i7byi/pokemo...
And for me it is not just the lack of transparency. It is the power balance. I should not need to work for free, give my data, and god knows what to play a game. I should not be living knowing that I am being exploited at each interaction with software. Transparency is good, but not enough. "Click here to accept" and thousands of lines of legalese do not create a fair society.
> And for me it is not just the lack of transparency. It is the power balance. I should not need to work for free, give my data, and god knows what to play a game.
If you have such a (legitimate) stance, why don't you delete Pokémon Go (and Ingress) as fast as possible from your mobile phone and encourage other people to do the same?
It was obvious from begin that the whole purpose of the game was that naive players are to take pictures of objects that are of interest to Niantic for free. The "payment" is a short dosis of dopamine high. A lot of players seemed to be perfectly fine with this kind of "payment".
I'm encouraging people to regulate big corporations. Fighting individually against corporations larger than countries makes no logical sense. What you are asking me is to follow a losing strategy.
> It was obvious from begin that the whole purpose of the game was that naive players are to take pictures of objects that are of interest to Niantic for free.
Even if a scam is obvious, it is still a scam and needs to be stop by the rule of law.
Niantic builds massive geospatial models that can localize and reconstruct views: https://www.nianticspatial.com/
Extremely detailed mappings of CONUS with spatial intelligence already built around it, and we let the company get sold to Saudi government last year.
They have then fed that data into a more modern version of colmap (https://github.com/colmap/colmap) to create a point cloud. Then the engineering to make sure that point cloud is aligned accurately and automatically.
Once you have that point cloud aligned to the world, all you need is another image with some overlapping feature. Using simple trigonometry you can work out where the camera is from one picture
This is largely trivial to do for a few 100 sqaure meters. the hard part is doing it fast in at the city scale. Extracting a few thousand features from an image and then matching them against >billion other points is hard to do quickly, without some optimisations.
The thing that is not mentioned here is that data freshness is actually more important. Building change (advertising hoardings, paint jobs, logo changes, building remodelled etc) so the data goes stale. Its actually not that expensive anymore to just send your own people to scan areas. (A number of startups pre 2020 did it, mapillary provides a platform for it, although now owned by facebook)
The robots will be feeding that data back in to the map. the special sauce is updating the map without infringing patents, and doing it efficiently.
What people dislike is noticing the strings attached so distastefully. I can't think of any fads or pastimes where there aren't any, but the benefits of the activity offered should outweigh the cost.
In that sense, Pokémon Go was a bad deal. I still don't get what was ever in it for the player.
Or is Ingress even still around?
PUSH your code to fit to find out more.