Mastodawn

This is kind of a silly take. Niantic are absolutely opportunists, who certainly didn’t see AI coming when Pokémon Go or Ingress premiered. What they’ve always been interested in is being a *source of user geolocation data* which they can monetise. First way was lucrative Pokémon IP. Now it’s AI.

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Quinn Norton 1d ago

@hacks4pancakes I'm really not sure how the data from Pokemon go gets you much that you don't get from tower data. Sure, it's sensitive data, but it's a subset of various other kinds of sensitive data everyone is already leaking.

It's certainly less data than LE get through telecom portals, or companies buy off providers. Feels like Niantic is playing bad guy to get cash for selling mostly redundant data.

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Quinn Norton

@hacks4pancakes also I don't know how pokemon go players are supposed to be doing something something AI given that the gameplay uses redundant paths a lot and mostly isn't capturing new meaningful data. It's just shaped like something scary.