An interesting thing is that in Russia, this military data grab by ostensibly 'our western would-be enemies" was supported by viral advertisement by nobody else but the head of Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill. A story was manufactured about arresting a 22 y.o. guy in the Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints for playing Pokemon Go. The story went hyper-hyped for weeks, with general public sentiment that o…
Apparently that story was manufactured and promoted by someone else, don't you think?
I stopped scanning pokestops because the effort has outweighed the rewards. A lot of the time, the requests show up as "research tasks" for a point of interest that I quickly passed by and have no interest in returning to, besides the tasks related to taking pictures of your buddy pokemon in augmented reality. Looks like I made the right choice by stopping. They do indicate to you up front that they will use the data…
That's what makes this feel so off
My 8 year old LOVES Pokemon Go, and we regularly go to a local meet up which is a fascinating microcosm of people of all ages from all walks of life. We’ve met some great people and had some incredible conversations, but I really struggle to see how we can continue in good faith now.
I seriously loath, hate & despise everything about this digital panopticon world being constructed around us.
This shouldn't be a surprise. But at this point it feels like if you don't completely avoid participating in digital society, your data will be used against you or groups/countries you support.
Mainly if you allow a government and / or corporations to do so, but unfortunately democracy and the like only gives you so much influence on that.
I stopped scanning pokestops because the effort has outweighed the rewards. A lot of the time, the requests show up as "research tasks" for a point of interest that I quickly passed by and have no interest in returning to, besides the tasks related to taking pictures of your buddy pokemon in augmented reality. Looks like I made the right choice by stopping. They do indicate to you up front that they will use the data…
> I always assumed the data would be used for large world model training or simulations.
That was the initial objective, improving navigation by having people walk slowly on pedestrian accessible locations instead of only the main roads. But once that data is collated, it could go anywhere and you've signed any rights to what happens with it away when you agreed to the Ts & Cs.
An interesting thing is that in Russia, this military data grab by ostensibly 'our western would-be enemies" was supported by viral advertisement by nobody else but the head of Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill. A story was manufactured about arresting a 22 y.o. guy in the Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints for playing Pokemon Go. The story went hyper-hyped for weeks, with general public sentiment that o…
Apparently that story was manufactured and promoted by someone else, don't you think?
Streisand effect marketing 4d chess move by Niantic?
Where are all the edgelords sending me cuckoo signs and tagging me as conspiracy theorist when I said that it compiles photogrammetry by placing pokemons at areas and angles with low image coverage? Ah, oh yes, "we all knew it from the start", "they indicated that up front" etc. Fuck no, everyone was foaming at the mouth how it's just a game and no way in hell an intelligence operation. P.S. Those who "knew it from t…
> it compiles photogrammetry by placing pokemons at areas and angles with low image coverage But that's not what happened. The data came from very explicit scanning tasks centered about pokestops, not the AR pokemon capture. I used it once or twice to test it out, and it was a drawn out process where it asks you to slowly orbit the pokestop while filming, then permission to upload the (huge) files. You even had to ac…
Well if such a conspiracy crackhead like me somehow happened to reach ranks of Niantic team, I'd totally make sure that there is a decoy "huge data upload point with explicit consent" to shift focus from covert data channels that slowly transmit all else using some custom image compression, maybe just some very small fraction of original data that by the mass nature of acquisition would mathematically still reconstruct the original data, or the fraction of that data that is enough to build a world model.
How useful is spatial data over time, does it decay or age much? Is the geographical data more useful, or are buildings and other structures more important? Genuinely don't know much in this space.
Compred to what? Datasets at this scale are rare. You're not comparing against another ideal dataset, you're comparing against having nothing.