BrikoX‘Pokémon Go’ players have been unknowingly training delivery robots
inari
TrackinDaKrakenIt’s only a matter of time, and money.
And while Niantic hasn’t suggested any plans to provide its VPS data to authorities, it’s not hard to see how a tool that can accurately pinpoint a location based on landmarks in a photograph could look enticing to law enforcement.
WhyIHateTheInternetI wouldn’t say unknowingly. When this thing started years ago as “Ingress” they were fairly open about how the data it collected will be helping all kinds of technology learning while you play. I loved playing Ingress, but never did try Pokemon.
I was thinking the same thing “whether they knew it or not” is disingenuous. 3d scanning was an opt-in feature they specifically said they’d be using to add real world objects to their database
I played Ingress a little bit before Pokemon Go came out, enough to recognize all the same physical locations were being re-used. I found it kind of uncanny for some reason.
What? Why wouldn’t they use the data they already have? The only way you would find that uncanny is if you assumed that data submitted to a company in one context is never re-used outside that context. No such promise was ever made; On the contrary, I seem to recall that we were told from the start that model building was the goal.
Niantic has pulled sheisty moves, but this isn’t one of them.
Oh yeah, I know that. It was more just a weird feeling that I find it hard to describe. Like, it felt like I was existing within multiple different realities at the same time for a brief moment. Just my imagination getting carried away, like how familiar objects can look like monsters in the dark, even though we know perfectly well what they really are.
Suckers!
TheTechnician27Never played Pokémon Go. Ironically tried out Ingress for about a week as a novelty. Probably contributing to this nightmare anyway by improving OpenStreetMap.
I will never, having seen the gameplay loop, understand Pokémon Go; I do basically the same thing while surveying, but the key difference is what I’m focused on. My hobby is also a thankless, never-ending grind with threadbare social interaction where everything I do is tracked, but everyone gets the data, and I get to pay attention to real, interesting things instead of what the dopamine slot machine says I get to have today.
No shit, and all the widely used captchas in the world have been training ML models too… as have all the voice recordings from all the smart assistants in everybody’s homes, phones and cars.
Lvxferre [he/him]
I don’t typically use this meme because Pokémon deserves no advertisement, but here it’s fitting.
…I fucking hate how modern tech is all about using you, instead of you using it.
ArtisianUnless you are a time traveler you had no way to know your data will be used this way in the future. The deal was only signed on March 10ht 2026.
idk, I assumed it would be used for every data-science application for all future time. the privacy policy was terrible.