You're telling me a company that was explicitly building location data was also tracking navigation habits? Shocked I am
this post was submitted on 24 Nov 2024
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Not only that, Pokemon Go wasn't their first attempt!
It's a re-skinned version of another game called Ingress.
Ingress was actually an amazing game, tbh. I loved it and the community
Yeah, it was fantastic. I've never experienced something as crazy as Ingress: being able to land in a foreign city, open my scanner and announce I just landed, and an hour later I'm at a bar having beers and hacking portals with a bunch of Ingress teammates was just mind blowing.
Also big field ops where we would go backpacking with sat modems... Gooood times.
I remember bumping into people at night omw home from work and sharing chargers to fill up our phones and talking. The first time we covered half of our city was amazing. It was up for like 1,5 days, as well. I don't think i ever played a mobile game that was actually that much fun.
Speaking of it in the past tense, is it abandoned?
apparently it's not :O
Smh my head, Ingress was a copy of a game called Shadow Cities. No one knows that cuz Ingress got a big corporate sponsorship and Shadow Cities eventually went belly up when the 4-person Dev team got bored.
It happens all the time.
Duolingo started by providing crowdsource-validated translations for third-parties. Google used captchas to improve their image search. Dark Sky sold real-rime elevation data to Stanford University to identify minute, localized seismic activity.
There are countless ways for developers to make data collection profitable.
I do see a difference between commercial applications by Google and seismic activities mapping by Stanford. Also if it comes from a university you know it’s been approved by some ethics board. Not saying those are perfect, but definitely better than Google.
I agree. Dark Sky was ethical in their data collection and sales. That doesn’t change the fact that most users are unaware of how a free app is using their information.
It's almost like companies are only focused on profits and will use any tactic you haven't thought of yet to make a profit off the masses.
It's like that old saying: If the service is free, you are the product.
Though, nowdays that's not always true, in the worst ways. You can pay for a product, and they'll also collect/sell all your data to double dip.
Just wait until this person hears about Facebook and Reddit
"I can't believe big corporations are collecting our data! Outrageous!" - posted to Facebook from iPhone.
That's why they hated when I spoofed. Lmao.
Joke's on them, I only played while walking laps with my dog in my neighborhood. Once they stopped allowing you to play while moving fast (in a car), I stopped trying to play on the go.
Also, I was really excited the day it first released and it was a hunting game, letting you know when you're getting closer to finding a Pokémon. But that apparently crashed their servers and they had to get rid of that feature. So now you only see Pokémon when you're close enough to spot them. I lost interest almost immediately and haven't played much of it since.
How can it be a scam if it's free to play?
devastating to find out that you weren't having fun all those times that you thought that you were having fun
People just want to feel cheated but telemetry has been around since google no one should be surprised.
telemetry has been around since google
Actually...
The beginning of industrial telemetry lies in the steam age ... Examples are James Watt's (1736-1819) additions to his steam engines for monitoring from a (near) distance such as the mercury pressure gauge and the fly-ball governor.
Internet based telemetry couldn’t have existed until at least the 1960-80. This telemetry wasn’t really as sophisticated as electronic based telemetry. The difference is one isn’t connected to your entire life.
Sure, but Google came out in 1998. I remember it taking over webcrawler and lycos. Telemetry definitely existed before then. But I get your point that telemetry really became a bad word much more recently.
It is actually image data that they were after for this large geospatial model. The game has quests where you scan an area (as well as the AR mode but I know dozens of people who play and no one uses it), which gives them the image and location pair. If they were just after your spatial coordinates they wouldn't need any of the machinery around Pokemon Go - Niantic is a Google spin off (with Google as a major owner), so they'd be able to get that data a million other ways (such as how apps like Wordscapes track your location - by showing you ads).
Very few people care.
Unfortunately.
I mean.... It seems obvious that they would do that.
Wait that's actually like a really smart way to crowdsource navigation data. Maybe they should have said they were doing it but like either way I feel like it doesn't really hurt anyone since they already knew their location was being sent to them
Waze was kind of like that back before Google bought it. It had an RPG element to it. There were coins along the roads and in last traveled roads there were larger rewards to entice you to take them. It was very upfront with what it was and what it was trying to accomplish.
Yes, it actually really is quite clever. The issue is they should have clearly informed people that data was being collected and how it would be used. What really rubs the salt in the wound is that the players who bought microtransactions, thinking they were supporting a game they liked, were actually paying to do valuable data collection work which they saw no upside from.
The Pokémon Go playerbase would have been much, much smaller if they had disclosed from the start, and that tells you all you need to know about whether this was a scumbag move which should be illegal.
They did disclose this from the start. Niantic has always been a geospatial computing company.
Did they clearly state what they'd be doing with the data? Or was it just buried in their terms as a general license to collect and commercialise player data?
Rhetorical question. It was the latter. But what I said was:
The issue is they should have clearly informed people that data was being collected and how it would be used
There's a certain point at which the argument "but they agreed to the terms of the contract" starts to sound disingenuous.
Honestly I'm not sure.
I played their first game Ingress back in the day and I remember at the time knowing that this is what they were doing with that data.
I don't remember reading it in the TOS but just looking into Niantic made it pretty obvious.
When Pokémon go pushed for that AR feature it seemed clear what their goal was with it.
I'm not defending them. Obviously people feel misled so it wasn't made clear enough.
Also not saying people who didn't know this were ignorant or anything. It's just that I don't think it was really a secret.
Wait til everyone finds out about what they are doing with the Pokémon Sleep game data.