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Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

nianticlabs.com

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Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#291

Post by blueflow »

nindalf wrote: post #288
reissbaker wrote: post #255

I'm confused by both this blog post, and the reception on HN. They... didn't actually train the model. This is an announcement of a plan! They don't actually know if it'll even work. They announced that they "trained over 50 million neural networks," but not that they've trained this neural network: the other networks appear to just have been things they were doing anyway (i.e. the "Virtual Positioning Systems"). The…

“Concepts of a plan” is often enough to make people think you know what you’re doing. Think most people, here included, got the impression that they had succeeded already.

Maybe its because the current HN title says "trained" in the past tense?

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#292

Post by blueflow »

astrange wrote: post #18
janice1999 wrote: post #3

I'm sure the CIA already has access. [1] People were raising privacy concerns years ago. [2] [1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/953621/the-cia-nsa-and-... [2] https://kotaku.com/the-creators-of-pokemon-go-mapped-the-wor...

People have a lot of strange beliefs about the CIA. Why would they even care about this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel is a major investor into Niantic.

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#293

Post by jchw »

blueflow wrote: post #291
nindalf wrote: post #288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Concepts of a plan” is often enough to make people think you know what you’re doing. Think most people, here included, got the impression that they had succeeded already.

Maybe its because the current HN title says "trained" in the past tense?

I'm annoyed that the HN title is still editorialized after multiple hours. It's not like the original title is especially egregious.

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#294

Post by themoonisachees »

try_the_bass wrote: post #204
AlphaWeaver wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine how those of us who played Ingress (Niantic's first game) feel... We were tricked into contributing location data for the game we loved, only to see it reused for the far more popular (and profitable) Pokemon Go.

I didn't feel tricked. Still don't. They were pretty up-front about it bring a technology demo for a game engine they were building. It was obvious from the start that they would build future games on the same platform.

Right? I feel like I'm taking crazy pills here and on Lemmy, the whole point of ingress was that it was made to sell Google mapping data and point of interest data, that's why the game didn't have monetizing practices for so long (of course it started having them once all the data was sold but hey)

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#295

Post by themoonisachees »

dgfitz wrote: post #11
darkwater wrote: post #8

I can really imagine a meeting with the big brasses of Google/Niantic a few years ago that went along - We need to be the first to have a better, new generation 3D model of the world to build the future of maps on it. How can we get that data?" + What about gamifying it and crowd-sourcing it to the masses? - Sure! Let's buy some Pokemon rights! It's scary but some people do really have some long-term vision

Pokemon Go is built on the same engine as Inverness I think its called. When it launched they even used the same POIs. I think this was ~5-7 years before PGO launched. Edit: I said inverness and meant ingress. Apologies.

Famously for a long time, the best way to get a point of interest into PGO was to play ingress and request it's addition there

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#296

Post by renewiltord »

relyks wrote: post #20

This is pretty cool, but I feel as a pokehunter (Pokemon Go player), I have been tricked into working to contribute training data so that they can profit off my labor. How? They consistently incentivize you to scan pokestops (physical locations) through "research tasks" and give you some useful items as rewards. The effort is usually much more significant than what you get in return, so I have stopped doing it. It's…

[flagged]

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#297

Post by smcin »

janice1999 wrote: post #3

I'm sure the CIA already has access. [1] People were raising privacy concerns years ago. [2] [1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/953621/the-cia-nsa-and-... [2] https://kotaku.com/the-creators-of-pokemon-go-mapped-the-wor...

I was wondering about the privacy implications: given a photo, the LGM could decode it to not just positioning, but also time-of-day and season (and maybe even year, or specific unique dates e.g. concerts, group activities).

Colors, amount of daylight(/nightlight), weather/precipitation/heat haze, flowers and foliage, traffic patterns, how people are dressed, other human features (e.g. signage and/or decorations for Easter/Halloween/Christmas/other events/etc.)

(as the press release says: "In order to solve positioning well, the LGM has to encode rich geometrical, appearance and cultural information into scene-level features"... but then it adds "And, as noted, beyond gaming LGMs will have widespread applications, including spatial planning and design, logistics, audience engagement, and remote collaboration.") So would they predict from a trajectory (multiple photos + inferred timeline) whether you kept playing/ stopped/ went to buy refreshments?

As written it doesn't say the LGM will explicitly encode any player-specific information, but I guess it could be deanonymized (esp. infer who visited sparsely-visited locations).

(Yes obviously Niantic and data brokers already have much more detailed location/time/other data on individual user behavior, that's a given.)

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#298

Post by Elvie »

relyks wrote: post #20

This is pretty cool, but I feel as a pokehunter (Pokemon Go player), I have been tricked into working to contribute training data so that they can profit off my labor. How? They consistently incentivize you to scan pokestops (physical locations) through "research tasks" and give you some useful items as rewards. The effort is usually much more significant than what you get in return, so I have stopped doing it. It's…

But did you really scan the items they wanted? Most people in my local community scan their hands or the pavements around the pokestop. They have a great map of London pavements if they want to do it.

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#299

Post by oneeyedpigeon »

hmcq6 wrote: post #243
interroboink wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nothing in our society operates in a way that might imply this. I beg your pardon? Consider just about any physical belonging — say, a book. When I buy a book, it belongs to me. When I read a book in my home, I expect it to be a private experience (nobody data-mining my eyeball movements, for example). This applies to all sorts of things. Even electronic things — if I put some files on a USB stick I expect them to…

> This applies to all sorts of things. Even electronic things — if I put some files on a USB stick I expect them to be "mine" and used as I please, not uploaded to the cloud behind my back, or similar. Every app you open on Mac sends a "ping" to Apples servers. https://acecilia.medium.com/apple-is-sending-a-request-to-th... .

> I have done some preliminary tests: with a script (a small program) that standalone runs in 0.4 seconds, the extra network requests that Apple performs are taking that number to 6 seconds in average, and in some cases when my wifi is slow, 70 seconds.

I just do not believe that. It sounds like a bug in a beta release. I'm sure I would have noticed if every ls I run took 6 seconds, and I'm sure many others would have too. Heck, I've used a Mac with the network turned off and it sure doesn't just refuse to run everything.

Re: Niantic plans a “Large Geospatial Model” trained on Pokémon Go player data

#300

Post by TeMPOraL »

saxonww wrote: post #134
PittleyDunkin wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would anyone think niantic would protect user-data from profit?

Sarcastically, no one should. Unsarcastically, a lot of people believe user data belongs to users, and that they should have a say in how it's used. Here, I think the point is that Niantic decided they could use the data this way and weren't transparent about it until it was already done. I'm sure I would be in the minority, but I would never have played - or never have done certain things like the research tasks - h…

>>>>> I have been tricked into working to contribute training data so that they can profit off my labor.

> Unsarcastically, a lot of people believe user data belongs to users, and that they should have a say in how it's used.

At some point this stops being a fair complaint, though. Most of the AI-related cases IMO are such.

To put it bluntly: expecting to be compensated for anything that can be framed as one's labor is such an extreme level of greed that even Scrooge McDuck would be ashamed of. In fact, trying to capture all value one generates, is at the root of most if not all underhanded or downright immoral business practices in companies both large and small.

The way society works best, is when people stop trying to catch all the value they generate. That surplus is what others can use to contribute to the whole, and then you can use some of their uncaptured value, and so on. That's how symbiotic relationships form; that's how ecosystems work.

> I'm sure I would be in the minority, but I would never have played - or never have done certain things like the research tasks - had I known I was training an AI model.

I have a feeling you wouldn't be in minority here, at least not among people with any kind of view on this.

Still, with AI stuff, anyone's fair share is $0, because that's how much anyone's data is worth on the margin.

It's also deeply ironic that nobody cares when people's data is being used to screw them over directly - such as profiling or targeting ads; but the moment someone figures out how to monetize this data in a way that doesn't screw over the source, suddenly everyone is up in arms, because they aren't getting their "fair share".

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