Pokemon Go players unknowingly trained a delivery robot service with 30 billion images

[thewayne]

Six years ago, the Pokemon Go app was updated to let users do 'field research' and scan statues and things. Niantic used photos and such to build 3D models of environments and mapped those into navigable fields for delivery robots.

Niantic thanks Pokemon Go players for their free contributions to Niantic's corporate bottom line. But no money will be forthcoming unless you're a stockholder.

From the article:
"This week, Niantic Spatial, part of the team behind Pokémon Go, announced a partnership with Coco Robotics, a company that makes short-distance delivery robots for food and groceries. Soon, those robot couriers will scoot around sidewalks using Niantic’s Visual Positioning System (VPS)—a navigation tool that can reportedly pinpoint location down to a few centimeters just by looking at nearby buildings and landmarks. Niantic trained that VPS model on more than 30 billion images captured by Pokémon Go users, and claims it will help robots operate in areas where GPS falls short."

Once again, if you're not paying for the product, then YOU are the thing being sold. The problem is, if you're a paying customer, you're still getting your data harvested and re-sold. You can't win, and you can't quit the game.

https://www.popsci.com/technology/pokemon-go-delivery-robots-crowdsourcing/

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/26/03/16/2136229/pokemon-go-players-unknowingly-trained-delivery-robots-with-30-billion-images

Comments

[disneydream06]

Glad I am not a Pokeman player. :o
That's awfully cheek to thank people for their "Free" contributions. :o
Hugs, Jon

[thewayne]

Well, that's my 'cheek'.  We need more humor in the world.  Like a corporation would thank people for doing things for them for free?!

[disneydream06]

AHH..... LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[conuly]

I hope AI eats them first.

[bibliofile]

Yeah, I rmeember when it came out that Niantic was of course using people's data (even just their walking-around paths, IIRC).

And people are still playing the game. Whatevs.

[thewayne]

Whenever an app asks to use my location data, it always gets 'only while using this app'.  NO ONE needs to get full time location info on me!  The cell company has to get it to route calls to me, that's how the system works.

[silveradept]

These are the kinds of things that I would bet the players would be less upset over if they had been asked, rather than it being something to the order of "well, you keep playing, so you've agreed to the T&C, and the T&C say we can do whatever we want with the data we collect from you, without having to ask you or compensate you for it."

A lot of PoGo players would probably be very happy with their images being used to do research on the problem described from a government basic research facility or a nonprofit or something similar, but to make more money for the parent company? That tends to raise blood pressure and start people swearing.

I still would love to see a law that says "no, you cannot set up a situation where a person has to agree to your terms and conditions without the ability to negotiate as a consequence of using your service." I'm sure there would be plenty of corporations more than happy to abuse such a law to their benefit, but I also secretly hope for the day where juries and magistrates both have the ability to say, "What you did may have not been expressly outlawed, but you clearly did it with the intention of being evil, therefore, you will be punished accordingly, rather than rewarded for finding the loophole."

[thewayne]

It's the basic problem of pretty much no one reads T&Cs because so much of it is unreadable.  I suppose you could feed them into a chatbot and see if it could find anything outside of normal legalese, but then you'd have to train it to reject false negatives.  At least it shows you the true colors of the game's providers.