But you don’t understand! Some of those Charizards were shiny!
the same budget
How much did this it cost to collect all this data?
What cost? The data collectors paid us!
Nothing is free. All free services are using your data somehow.
If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
In this case, it was mostly children’s data.
If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
Except most free and open-source software, major open knowledge bases, literally the social media service you’re using to communicate this point right now…
While understandable when talking about services by for-profit corporations, this talking point without that context is oversimplified to the point of being obnoxious in a world where I can set up a desktop OS with a fully featured environment and software suite then go browse a social media site where at no stage was anything free where I was the product.
Edit: Moreover, an arguably worse problem with this saying in 2026 is that it implies (doesn’t outright state, but implies to an uninformed reader) that paid services can save them from this, which these days is almost universally untrue.
Yeah, I didn’t think I needed to make clear I meant with for profit companies like Nintendo.
Yeah, revised version:
If you’re not paying you’re the product. If you are paying you’re still the product and paying for the privilege*.
- Except for not for profit software / platforms.
Humm, that’s not as pithy.
Pokémon Go already has multiple revenue streams, including direct in-app purchases.
Yeah, but many players don’t pay, especially the huge player bases of children. They can subsidise that by selling your data.
Pokemon go has been extremely profitable, the free to play model works. They don’t need to subsidize shit.
Free to play games work by being pay2win and by catering to whales. Sorry but you are wrong.
I’ve been in software design and development for decades. Sorry, but you are wrong.
The reason these companies are so profitable is because they sell your data.
Whales are fine, but that’s not their only revenue stream. People freely give up their data to them and that’s stupidly valuable. If you think these companies aren’t selling it, you’re very naive.
And to be clear, you’re saying this in response to an article pointing out they’ve been selling your data.
I’m a data engineer, ofc I know that. But you were excusing it as if their service has costs. That’s bs, because their reported earnings that done without whatever profit they are going to gain from this harvest of train data already were very profitable.
That’s why I said you were in the wrong. Not because you expected them to sell everything they could, so did I, but because you justified that behaviour from the free to play model. That model exists in plenty games that are extremely successful without harvesting things beyond metadata.
I wasn’t justifying it. Perhaps that came across the wrong way.
They’re selling shit they never asked their users for and that’s bullshit, and should be illegal. Especially with children’s data.
My point was they’re doing it.
You guys agree and it’s just the word “subsidy” he has an issue with because subsidies have the connotation of helping actual people.
Is the fediverse free?
While the admins and donations make it free, I guarantee there’s at least a few corporations or government organizations out there scraping the fediverse to gather data. So even though the people hosting it might not have any bad intentions, an open platform like this will still feed the data hungry machine.
scraping the fediverse
Saturday I was looking up bottles and raftvr, one of the links brought me back to LEMMY!!!
Again, I meant for profit companies, like Nintendo.
Volunteer led orgs are different. Particularly those run by socialists.
e: most volunteer/socialist orgs don’t have ‘customers’.
Yay, thanks
Even if the data comes from kids, it’s not identifiable or personal. It could loosely fall under unpaid child labour if the in-game task is actually just a job in disguise.
This is - unfortunately - not surprising. Niantic has always been in the business of selling/using user data for profit, they were a spin-off from Google after all. Their first big game, Ingress, was used to train Google Maps.
I feel like this was common knowledge back in 2016. Is this surprising to anyone?
Yeah I’ve known about this for like 5 years. It’s not at all new.
I thought so too. I seem to remember it almost being a selling point. Like: “Your adventures are being used to improve maps and train AI systems for the future of humanity! Yay!”
But I had a look at their old pages from 2017-2020ish in the Wayback machine and there’s no mention of it. In fact, their privacy policies seemed to try to make it very clear that they don’t sell or share user data except where needed to deliver the service or in anonymised aggregate to third parties (48 people went to your business while playing Pokemon!).
There’s some mention of using it to advertise but none of them mention using it to build an advanced geo-spacial dataset for AI. Unless I’m missing something or reading it wrong?
Might be a Mandela effect.
Definitely not Mandela, but maybe it’s something Google never officially confirmed.
Here’s an article about Ingress, the spiritual predecessor to PkmnGo. https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg21628936-200-why-googles-ingress-game-is-a-data-gold-mine/
I am one of the lucky 10,000 today 😄
And this is why you dont take AR scans of pokestops/use ar mode. The free $1 poffin isnt worth the betrayal of the area.
Goofy.
When I played I just spoiled the data. I found out that you can just hold a white piece of paper in front of the camera and bounce your phone lightly up and down to simulate movement (since they want you to walk around the real world location you’re photographing). Other persons I played with just photographed their shoes, so Niantic only had useless photos.
I’d guess the majority of players properly adhered to guidelines when doing AR field research. A small minority probably uploaded useless data.
Hey! Whoa! That’s uncalled for!
…Goofy isn’t even a Pokemon.
I thought they were working on getting people to Pokémon Go to the polls!
Holy shit that was almost 10 years ago. Time flies when everyday gets shittier and shittier.
Time flies when you live in a time sucking vacume of existential dread, exacerbated by a deadly global pandemic which was made even worse by a political party trying to prolong the death hoping to gain a political advantage in the then upcoming election.
We live in the dumbest timeline.
I Agree 💯💯💯
All I want is for politics to be something I only have to think about a few months before Election Day. My grandmother who’s in her 80s told me that was the way it was back in the day. Republicans ruined American society all because they are a bunch of stuck up loser bitches and are do nothing good organized criminals.
Republicans ruined American society all because they are a bunch of stuck up loser bitches and are do nothing good organized criminals.
I need this printed on a hoodie.
Republicans (and Democrats) ruined American society because people only thought about politics a few months before election day.
I always thought that Joe Biden’s campaign slogan should have been “Make Politics Boring Again”
Let’s go to sleep for four years! Yeah, see how well that turned out?
Is this bad? I mean I guess it has the potential to damage delivery workers, but isn’t working for grubhub or doordash already kind of a scam anyway? That’s before we consider that the likelyhood of any product coming to market that could actually successfully do deliveries. Sounds like a job complicated beyond the capabilities of any robot now or in the near future anyway.
Just like recaptchas training OCR
I don’t automatically have a negative opinion about this, I would need more information before that. Did the terms of service allow for this?
It’s a fascinating case study on crowdsourcing data that is useful to this navigation technology, and reminds me of the first captchas that helped train OCR engines.
Niantic is a google company
Was…
