'Pokemon Go' Players Unknowingly Trained Delivery Robots With 30 Billion Images 57
More than 30 billion images captured by Pokemon Go players have helped train a visual mapping system developed by Niantic. The technology is now being used to guide delivery robots from Coco Robotics through city streets where GPS often struggles. Popular Science reports: This week, Niantic Spatial, part of the team behind Pokemon 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 Pokemon Go users, and claims it will help robots operate in areas where GPS falls short. [...]
Instead of helping users navigate the way that GPS does, VPS determines where someone is based on their surroundings. That makes Pokemon Go particularly useful as a data source, because players had to physically travel to specific locations and point their phones at various angles. That mapping effort got a significant boost in 2020, when the app added what it called "Field Research," a feature prompting players to scan real-world statues and landmarks with their cameras in exchange for in-game rewards. A portion of the data also reportedly came from areas known as "Pokemon battle arenas." Whether players knew it or not, those scans were creating 3D models of the real world that would eventually power the Niantic model. More data means better accuracy, and because Niantic was collecting images of the same locations from many different users, it could capture the same spots across varying weather conditions, lighting, angles, and heights. [...]
The idea is that Coco's robots can use VPS and four cameras mounted around the machine to get a far more precise read on their surroundings. In turn, the well-equipped robot will deliver food on time. On a broader level, Niantic says its partnership with Coco Robotics is part of a longer-term effort to build a "living map" of the world that updates as new data becomes available. Once VPS-equipped delivery robots hit the streets, they will collect even more info that can be fed back into the model to bolster its accuracy further. This kind of continuous, real-world data collection is already central to how self-driving vehicle companies like Waymo and Tesla operate, and is a large part of why that technology has improved so significantly in recent years.
Instead of helping users navigate the way that GPS does, VPS determines where someone is based on their surroundings. That makes Pokemon Go particularly useful as a data source, because players had to physically travel to specific locations and point their phones at various angles. That mapping effort got a significant boost in 2020, when the app added what it called "Field Research," a feature prompting players to scan real-world statues and landmarks with their cameras in exchange for in-game rewards. A portion of the data also reportedly came from areas known as "Pokemon battle arenas." Whether players knew it or not, those scans were creating 3D models of the real world that would eventually power the Niantic model. More data means better accuracy, and because Niantic was collecting images of the same locations from many different users, it could capture the same spots across varying weather conditions, lighting, angles, and heights. [...]
The idea is that Coco's robots can use VPS and four cameras mounted around the machine to get a far more precise read on their surroundings. In turn, the well-equipped robot will deliver food on time. On a broader level, Niantic says its partnership with Coco Robotics is part of a longer-term effort to build a "living map" of the world that updates as new data becomes available. Once VPS-equipped delivery robots hit the streets, they will collect even more info that can be fed back into the model to bolster its accuracy further. This kind of continuous, real-world data collection is already central to how self-driving vehicle companies like Waymo and Tesla operate, and is a large part of why that technology has improved so significantly in recent years.
If it's free... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Then you're the product.
sure, right, because if you're a paying customer you're NEVER also a product.
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if you're a customer, paying or not, you're always also a product unless specifically prevented by law or binding contract.
can't say for certain when it wasn't the case but it's been true longer than the WWWeb has been around
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Re:If it's free... (Score:5, Insightful)
Honestly, this is just about the best plan for getting deep involvement in crowdsourced training data I can think of. It's fucking brilliant.
You come up with a mobile video game where the whole premise is to go around taking pictures of stuff. You co-brand it with a ridiculously popular video game and collectible trading card IP. You back up an armored truck to shovel all the money into.
And then you use that constant firehose of images coming in of urban areas across the globe to train your AI navigation system. Nobody's personal data is exposed or sold any more than what Google Streetmaps shows.
This doesn't seem evil to me at all. It seems like a really fucking good business strategy to turn the most expensive part of your business plan into a revenue center.
Yeah, it seems evil to me. (Score:1)
Re:If it's free... (Score:5, Informative)
Niantic started life as an internal team at Google working on monetising location data. Being a revenue centre was the whole point from day one.
Only the "delivery robots" bit of this is actually news. Niantic being a datamining operation that tricked its users into scanning the real world for it is not. Hell Zuboff devoted a chunk of "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" to it and that book came out in 2019.
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Re: If it's free... (Score:2)
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If you make this comment, you have low IQ.
Nothing is every black and white. You can pay for something and still have your information and participation re-monetised elsewhere (be the product twice), and just because you don't pay for something doesn't mean you're not using a product. Ultimately you need to be kept happy to keep using the free thing.
Please make more intelligent comments in the future. The "you're the product" meme is a progressive stupification of the world. Try and understand the complexiti
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To be clear...PoGo is *not* free. Absolutely, positively, NOT free. ;) Yeah, you're still the product for sure...but you pay dearly for that privilege. I may or may not have an addicted spouse, so I may or may not know.
(Yes, you *can* play for free...or could at one time...but you're entirely ineffective and capped at what you can actually do to the point of being worthless.)
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800 goog 411 (Score:4, Insightful)
Was a free directory assistance program that was also a training program for Google voice recognition. When they had enough data, they canned the service.
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When they had enough data, they canned the service.
That's basic conspiracy level thinking. In reality by the end it was barely used and got canned because running a virtually useless service doesn't make any sense. Forget the idea that "once they had enough data", even if you subscribe to this thinking the question is "once the data trickled in at a rate lower than it was worth collecting" would be the correct conspiracy.
What next? Complaints that your post office no longer delivers telegrams?
Should we be outraged? (Score:5, Insightful)
Lots of people played a free game that required them to take lots of pictures. Did the players ever think the photos would be theirs to keep? If so, what made them think that?
The use of these photos also seems pretty benign and useful.
I'm having trouble having a problem with this.
Re:Should we be outraged? (Score:5, Informative)
Firstly, this is not in any way surprising or upsetting. Niantic's been pretty clear for a long time now that they were making location-based games for the purpose of training systems.
Secondly, I should note that POGO does not actually require you to take pictures of anything. It's an option, one way to do what Pokemon Go calls "Field Research Tasks" (FRTs), but "take a scan of that place" FRTs are a small subset of the FRTs you might choose to do (and when I was attempting to get as many as possible on my way to level 74 I ignored all the scanning ones).
Re:Should we be outraged? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm right there with you. This seems to me to be a quite brilliant way to make the most expensive part of your business strategy (obtaining billions of photos of cities across the globe, being targeted in real time to get you the image coverage you need) into a wildly successful revenue generator. They figured out the problem, and then came up with a creative solution to it, and then backed up the armored truck to shovel money into.
It's not like they're privacy raping you for money like Google / Meta / X / etc. This is basically a smarter Google StreetView, without the car.
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If I had mod points, I'd mod your post Funny. Everything in your world seems to be about doom and gloom and massive unemployment and UBI. You must be the center of attention at every party you go to!
Well, sure, it's not funny when a grandma goes to jail because she's poor. But I have no idea what the poor grandma's case has to do with Pokemon Go using photos to train delivery drones.
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Here's a good example. YouTuber Patrick Boyle did a good video about how the SpaceX IPO is basically a scam. What it boils down to is they already have all the possible launch contracts except for launching those starlink internet satellites and they're just aren't enough potential customers who don't already have good wired internet for starlink
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YouTube is a soapbox, not a source. Anything dramatic said on YouTube, needs to be backed up with an actual, authoritative source. Otherwise, it's nothing more than a crackpot yelling into the sky, looking for clicks.
Even if completely true, I feel no doom and gloom from the SpaceX situation. Those billion poor people, are poor not because of SpaceX, but because of the corrupt governments they live under. Go after the dictators, they are the real culprits when it comes to world poverty, not the capitalists.
Scaniverse (Score:4, Informative)
Niantic put out a 3d scanning app a couple years ago based on the same technology. It is better than photometry. They've been pretty open about how they're using all the pictures and scand.
I'm okay with this (Score:5, Interesting)
I literally am perfectly okay with this. Now, if they were taking photos off your device without permission, then there should be pitchforks. But photos you voluntarily sent to them? It's all good.
Re: I'm okay with this (Score:2)
Same. I've been playing for years.
Did I know exactly what they were doing with those scans? No, but I didn't figure they doing it for nothing. That's not exactly "unknowingly."
That said, the places they encourage scanning are way too far apart to get any decent coverage. If you want to deliver something to your neighborhood church fountain, it's great. But as a delivery system anywhere outside of a dense city, I think it'll have lousy coverage. Maybe it's enough to reorient a robot?
Re: I'm okay with this (Score:2)
Oh, right, delivery robot.
It IS for a densely populated area. Well done.
Ninantic, capitalist of the millenia (Score:3)
Every online corporation is now wondering how to gamify their data collection.
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I mean, tons of things are "gamified" without being full on video games. Manufacturing consent is a sort of game for companies. They dangle various carrots to get us to pull their carts every hour of every day. It's the cornerstone of sales/marketing/advertising.
I'm not sure who is lying to themselves about this (Score:3)
but someone is.
Most people who played Pokemon go (and ingress and various other map based games) were well aware that the purpose was to build map data in various forms. They just didn't care, probably because they didn't see how it was going to affect them negatively.
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didn't say it was.
I said someone's lying to themselves about people not knowing the data collection is happening.
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Node submissions were pretty obviously and explicitly crowdsourced gathering of public landmark data. I don't think it was ever confusing that that was the underlying point of running the game, and it provided plenty of amusement in the meantime, so seems like a fine deal to me, and I didn't see much cause for concern at Niantic/Google knowing where the pretty fountains in local parks were.
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my guy.
pokemon go was released in 2016. odds are, no teenager has played it in years.
Isn't there a tax issue? (Score:2)
Fair trade, as stated in the user agreement. They made a game and you paid them for that. I'd say the biggest issue is tax. In theory is that not bartering and taxable? Reference: https://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/... [irs.gov]
Surprised? (Score:3)
Niantic told us ten years ago, that they use the Pokemon Go and Ingress data to do this. This was never a secret.
"Unknowingly" sounds a litte hyperbolish (Score:2)
not a surprise? (Score:2)
I thought it was obvious that both Pokemon Go and Ingress before it were pretty clearly gamified crowdsourcing of landmark data. Totally unsurprising for that data to be used - in fact, it was already used once, the initial batch of pokestops _were_ the landmarks imported from Ingress. Crowdsourcing public landmark locations & photos is pretty inoffensive and using it for almost whatever seems fine, so long as they aren't also selling the specific "who was here when" data that they do admittedly have.
Another lost funny (Score:1)
opportunity