Seems like navigation is ‘solved’? There’s already a lot of technology supporting permanence of virtual objects based on spatial mapping? Better AI generated animations?

I am sure there are a ton of innovations it could unlock…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVmZy95vMUc

Niantic was a spinoff divested from Google Maps roughly a decade ago who created a game called Ingress. This used Open Street Maps data to place players in the real world and they could designate locations as points of interest (POI), which Niantic used human moderators to judge as sufficiently noteworthy. Two years after Ingress was released, Niantic purchased limited rights to use Pokemon IP and bootstrapped Pokemon Go from this POI data. Individual points of interest became Pokestops and Gyms. Players had to physically go to these locations and they could receive in-game items needed to continue playing or battle other Pokemon.

From the beginning, Pokemon Go had AR support, but it was gimmicky and not widely used. Players would post photos of the real world with Pokemon overlaid and then turn it off, as it was a significant battery drain and only slowed down your ability to farm in-game items. The game itself has always been a grind type of game. Play as much as possible to catch Pokemon, spin Pokestops, and you get rewards from doing so. Eventually, Niantic started having raids as the only way to catch legendary Pokemon. These were multiplayer in-person events that happened at prescribed times. A timer starts in the game and players have to be at the same place at the same time to play together to battle a legendary Pokemon, and if they defeat it, they'll be rewarded with a chance to catch one.

Something like a year after raids were released, Niantic released research tasks as a way to catch mythical Pokemon. These required you to complete various in-game tasks, including visiting specific places. Much later than this, these research tasks started to include visiting designated Pokestops and taking video footage, from a large enough variety of angles to satisfy the game, and then uploading that. They started doing this something like four or five years ago, and getting any usable data out of it must have required an enormous amount of human curation, which was largely volunteer effort from players themselves who moderated the uploads. The game itself would give you credit simply for having the camera on while moving around enough, and it was fairly popular to simply videotape the sidewalk and the running game had no way to tell this was not really footage of the POI.

The quality of this data has always been limited. Saying they've managed to build local models of about 1 million individual objects leaves me wondering what the rate of success is. They've had hundreds of millions of players scanning presumably hundreds of millions of POI for half a decade. But a lot of the POI no longer exist. Many of them didn't exist even when Pokemon Go was released. Players are incentivized to have as many POI near them as possible because this provides the only way to actually play, and Niantic is incentivized to leave as much as they can in the game and continually add more POI because, otherwise, nobody will play. The mechanics of the game have always made it tremendously imbalanced in that living near the center of a large city with many qualifying locations results in rich, rewarding gameplay, whereas living out in the suburbs or a rural area means you have little to do and no hope of ever gaining the points that city players can get.

This means many scans are of objects that aren't there. Near me, this includes murals that have long been painted over, monuments to confederate heroes that were removed during Black Lives Matter furors of recent years, small pieces of art like metal sculptures and a mailbox decorated to look like Spongebob that simply are not there any more for one reason or another, but the POI persist in the database anyway. Live scans will show something very different from the original photo that still shows up in-game to tell you what the POI is.

Another problem is many POI can't be scanned from all sides. They're behind fences, closed off because of construction, or otherwise obstructed.

Yet another problem is GPS drift. I live near downtown Dallas right now, but when the game started, I lived smack dab in the city center, across the street from AT&T headquarters. I started playing as something to do when walking during rehab from spine surgeries, but I was often bedridden and couldn't actually leave the apartment. No problem. I could receive sometimes upwards of 50km a day of credit for walking simply by leaving my phone turned on with the game open. As satellite line of sight is continually obstructed and then unobstructed by all the tall buildings surrounding your actual location, your position on the map will jump around. The game has a built-in speed limit meant to prevent people from playing while driving, and if you jump too fast, you won't get credit, but as long as the jumps in location are small enough to keep your average over some sampling interval below that limit, you're good to go. Positions within a city center where most of the POI actually are is very poor.

They claim here that they have images from "all times of day," which is possibly true if they literally mean daylight hours. I'm awake here writing this comment at 2:30 AM and have always been a very early riser. I stopped playing this game last summer, but when I still played, it was mostly in darkness, and one of the reason I quit was the frustration of constantly being given research tasks I could not possibly complete because the game would reject scans made in the dark.

Finally, POI in Ingress and Pokemon Go are all man-made objects. Whatever they're able to get out of this would be trained on nothing from the natural world.

Ultimately, I'm interested in how many POI the entire map actually has globally and what proportion the 1 million they've managed to build working local models of represents. Seemingly, it has to be objects that (1) still exist, (2) are sufficiently unobstructed from all sides, and (3) in a place free from GPS obstructions such that the location of players on the map is itself accurate.

That isn't nothing, but I'm enormously skeptical that they can use this to build what they're promising here, a fully generalizable model that a robot could use to navigate arbitrary locations globally, as opposed to something that can navigate fairly flat city peripheries and suburbs during daylight hours. If Meta can really get a large enough number of people to wear sunglasses with always-on cameras on them, this kind of data will eventually exist, but I highly doubt what Niantic has right now is enough.

When users scan their barcode, the preview window is zoomed in so users think its mostly barcode. We actually get quite a bit more background noise typically of a fridge, supermarket aisle, pantry etc. but it is sent across to us, stored, and trained on.

Within the next year we will have a pretty good idea of the average pantry, fridge, supermarket aisle. Who knows what is next

I will say that the bit about showing users only the barcode but capturing photos outside that was pretty clever; it's the kind of detail that belongs in a Neal Stephenson novel. But that's exactly the kind of thing that a million startups would do right now. Yea in retrospect it's kinda stupid that someone would admit this and also be proud to get a better set of photos of refrigerators and supermarket aisles.

So, is this a grade-A 2024 version of Andy Kaufman comedy that requires just one dolt in the audience to take it seriously? Hah. I guess if so it wouldn't be funny unless someone like me took the bait. I see the humor. But if you analyze why it was funny, the primary reason would be the fact that it was so possible to take it seriously. Especially with 134 or so upvotes, the user writing had exactly the amount of cachet as someone who had interned at a sleazy startup for 2 months and was proud of something really stupid.

If this is real and not a joke, I bet some DPA will disagree if this is brought to their attention. Effective consent under GDPR requires informed consent.

That completes the circuit. It's a nice setup.

The goalposts of what counts as AI are constantly moving further and further away. Simple algorithms like A* once counted as part of AI.

It would be nice of them though.

Until pretty recently, phone telemetry data was a free-for-all, and if you’re, say, in legal trouble, a map of the location of your phone over the past… however long you’ve had your phone is immediately available.

I would argue that's being legally truthful, but not practically truthful. The company knows there are ways they can ensure their consumers are aware of the truth. And they know that burying it in Ts and Cs isn't one of them.

That was fairly obvious at the time. And people used more or less exactly the same language to describe the world back then, too.

> These kinds of comments are extraordinarily disingenuous sounding, particularly when anyone can spend 3 seconds and figure out their primary market is literal children.

Poke Mongo was popular with people of all age groups, and (most) children have parents or other guardians to help them with these decisions.

But I think your point, if I understand it correctly, is that the in-game rewards kind of "hacked your brain" to do it, which is the part you're objecting to?

Being somehow surprised they actually plan to do things with the data they have you gather is a bit weird.

which is totally unfair, every niantic player should have access to all the stuff because they collectively made it

The farmers you buy the vegetables from are also generally unaware of how you use them, too!

I fail to see how you're differentiating the analogy from the original example.

This is also wildly antisocial behavior, and if everyone behaved like this, the world would be a really shit place. I know many people have a genuine "fuck you, I got mine" attitude, but if everyone had it, the world would be infinitely worse off.

If you don't like the terms of the game, don't play it? Why does dislike of the terms merit what essentially amounts to cheating (under the spirit of the rules, if not the letter)? This attitude makes even less sense than the one I was originally critiquing

Sure, copying it is approximately free. But using it provides value, and sharing the model dilutes the value of its usage. The fact that it's free to copy doesn't mean it's free to share. The value of the copy that Niantic uses will be diluted by every copy they make and share with someone else.

> Additionally, many people can contribute to make something greater that benefits everyone (see open source). So the argument of “you couldn’t have done this on your own” also doesn’t hold any water.

Your second sentence does not logically follow from the first. In fact, your first sentence is an excellent example of the point I was making: many people contribute to open-source projects, and the value of the vast majority of those contributions on their own do not amount to the sum total value of the projects they've contributed to. This is what I meant by "your own individual input is itself insufficient to have created it in the first place". Sure, many people contribute to open source projects to make them what they are, but in the vast majority of cases, any individual contributor on their own would be unable to create those same projects.

To rephrase your first sentence: the value of the whole is greater than the value of the parts. There is value in putting all the pieces together in the right way, and that value should rightfully be allocated to those who did the synthesis, not to those who contributed the parts.

Is a canvas-maker entitled to every painting produced on one of their canvasses? Without the canvas the painting would not exist--but merely producing the canvas does not make it into a painting. The value is added by the artist, not the canvas-maker--therefore the value for the produced art should mostly go to the artist, not the canvas-maker. The canvas maker is compensated for the value of the canvas itself (which isn't much), and is entitled to nothing beyond.

> The only thing that protects niantic is just a shitty ToS like the rest of the games that nobody pays attention to. There is nothing fundamentally “right” about what they did.

There's also nothing fundamentally wrong about it, either, which was my point. Well, my point was actually that it's even more shitty to demand the sum total of the output when you only contributed a tiny slice of the input.

Anyway I’m all for outlawing the inclusion of predatory clauses in EULA but this is not one of this case.

People just want to have their cake and eat it to.

That is how monetization for free to play games have worked for a very long time now. Changing that without letting people know up front is absolutely a betrayal of trust.

I beg your pardon?

Consider just about any physical belonging — say, a book. When I buy a book, it belongs to me. When I read a book in my home, I expect it to be a private experience (nobody data-mining my eyeball movements, for example).

This applies to all sorts of things. Even electronic things — if I put some files on a USB stick I expect them to be "mine" and used as I please, not uploaded to the cloud behind my back, or similar.

And if we're just limiting ourselves to what we do in public (eg: collecting pokemon or whatever), it's still normal, I think, to interact relatively anonymously with the world. You don't expect people to remember you after meeting them once, for example.

In summary, I'd say that "things in our society" very much include people (and their tendency to forget or not care about you), and physical non-smart objects. Smart phones and devices that do track your every move and do remember everything are the exception, not the rule.

<insert obnoxious EU-akshually>

Despite what success fantasies and other self-help garbage teach people, a lot of society — most of it, actually — does not work on greed. That you can ignore thinking about it is itself a statement about deep foundations under the shallow bling.

Off the top of my head I think GDPR in the EU might have something to say about this. I don't know if those protections exist anywhere else or not.

In the US, people get very upset about things like traffic cameras, and public surveillance in general. Those are usually data-for-punishment vs. data-for-profit (...maybe?), but people here resist things like data recorders in their cars to lower car insurance.

At least to me, being unhappy about Niantic's behavior here does not seem the least bit unusual.

Sure, but that disconnect between what people think and how things work is almost fully general over all subjects.

I've seen people (behave as if they) think translation is just the words, but that leads to "hydraulic ram" becoming "water sheep". People who want antibiotics for viral infections, or who refuse vaccines (covid and other) claiming they're "untested" or have "side effects" while promoting alternatives that both failed testing and have known side effects. I've seen people speak as if government taxation only exists because the guy in charge of taxes is, personally, greedy. I've heard anecdotes of people saying that you can get people to follow the rules by saying "first rule is to always follow the rules" and directly seen people talk as if banning something is sufficient to make it stop.

The idea that it's even possible to do make a model like this from the user data, is probably mind-blowing to a lot of people.

The naïve assumption most people seem to have is that computers do only what they, personally as end-users, tell them to do, and that they're as slow as the ad-riddled web front-end with needlessly slow transition animations placed there to keep user engagement high — rather than the truth, that software primarily does what the operator of the service wants it to do, and that it's absolutely possible for a home PC[0] to hold and query a database of all 8 billion people on the planet and the two trillion or so different personal relationships between them.

When GenAI images were new, some of the artists communities said "That content generated can reference hundreds, even thousands of pieces of work from other artists to create derivative images"[1], rather than millions of images, because the scale of computer performance is far beyond the comprehension of the average person. The fact that the average single image contributes so little to any given model that it can't even represent its own filename, even moreso.

And so it is with stuff like this: what can be done, cannot be comprehended by the people who, theoretically, gave consent that their data be used in that way.

[0] Of course, these days most people don't have home PCs; phone, perhaps a tablet, they may have a small low performance media server if they're fancy, but what we here would think of as a PC is to all that as a Ferrari etc. is to a Honda Civic.

[0] https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/10321622

https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/406246/all-applica... or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25074959

But that's all kinda besides the point. Companies invading users privacy is pretty common, you just need to look