alt Hacker NewsThis 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.
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> I have been tricked into working to contribute training data so that they can profit off my labor
You were playing a game without paying for it. How did you imagine they were making money without pimping your data?
They won't. It's the same data collection play as every other Google project
Just for clarity on this comment and a separate one, Niantic is a Google spin out company and appears to still be majority shareholder: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niantic,_Inc.#As_an_independen...
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.
Were you really tricked? Hard to believe that someone on Hacker News saw Pokemon Go and didn't immediately think of the data collection possibilities.
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.
They did at least published their research, and also dataset for 655 places:
https://research.nianticlabs.com/mapfree-reloc-benchmark
This was linked the news post (search for "data that we released").
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.
Now imagine how artists feel – and they didn’t even get any Pocket Monsters in return.
Weren't they pretty open about this being their business model?
> 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.
> and give you some useful items as rewards
Were you tricked, or were you just poorly compensated for your time?
One of the reasons i never played pokemon go is because there was no guarantee I didnt have my data sold.
I can't tell you why other people wouldn't think of this concern
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.
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!
As the old adage goes, "if you're not paying for the product, you ARE the product"...
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!
Please don't tell me you were just now realizing this
“If you're not paying for the product, you are the product”
(I realize you can pay, but are not required to)
Did anyone here on hackernews not seriously assume this was the real reason for the existence of that game since day 1?
Yeah it’s horrible. The other day I made a comment on this website and someone learned something from it without my consent. I explicitly refuse permission for you to read this comment. You do NOT have permission. Our privacy is important and I will protect my rights. If you donate 10% of your annual income to the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, I think I’d understand. Anything less is RAPE of my rights! The 4-equidistant time points can be considered as Time Square imprinted upon the circle of Earth: a higher order of life time cube.
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.
My reaction, also.
"You used me... for LAND DEVELOPMENT! ...That wasn't very nice."
I mean it was ultimately a research task
The game is free, there has to be some way for them to profit, interesting to see this was it.
Really? You feel … tricked? Are you new around here??
Well now by posting your thoughts to hn, you have been tricked yet again to give up free labor to train ai models.
> I feel … I have been tricked
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.