Technology

Yeah I'm perfectly fine telling Big Data that where I walk is a walkable path or that the PoIs I pass exist there. There are just as many positive uses of that info as negative.

Most people just want to collect Pokemon and don't read up on what the company that made the app is doing.

And self driving cars

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.

True for Corps but not everything

Pokémon Go already has multiple revenue streams, including direct in-app purchases.

the same budget

How much did this it cost to collect all this data?

What cost? The data collectors paid us!

But you don't understand! Some of those Charizards were shiny!

It's bad under capitalism, because it means that the ruling class get to keep an even higher percentage of profits.

Under socialism, it's good.

Fully automated luxury gay space communism would be awesome, but until we get socialism, we should take cues from the luddite movement.

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.

This comes up every couple of months like some freshly uncovered secret. You can see it in Google trends too. I'm surprised to see this being so prevalent over the fediverse, I thought karma farming wasn't a thing over here. 

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.

I am one of the lucky 10,000 today 😄

Holy shit that was almost 10 years ago. Time flies when everyday gets shittier and shittier.