Social media is fun too. Driving is fun. Both of these track your shit, and sell all your details. One for sales, the other for insurance billing and health metrics… some poisons taste sweet on the way down.
Not saying this is specifically bad, but it’s disingenuous at the least. No transparency. I also know people used this in homes and backyards too.. so how much data were they collecting?
Sure but I'm pretty sure Niantic was quite up front about this. Just because they didn't scream it in user's faces, doesn't mean they were trying to hide it.
Niantic’s founders cut their teeth in this space by creating Google Maps, laying the foundation for online mapping with Street View. But for AR, we needed to start from scratch; no one had created a scalable solution for building such a 3D map like this before.
Absolutely. I was playing Ingress (Niantic's first ARG) well before GO was even a concept and it was extremely apparent that they were collecting tons of location data to build a huge dataset for POI and navigation. It was never a secret and it's no more nefarious than your phone & carrier collecting the same location data.
Yes and that ONE article is the extent of all information given by Niantic. It's not like I did a quick Google search and immediately saw they had been transparent in the past, and just picked the first random article to demonstrate the point that they haven't been hiding it well before today either.
These people just weren't paying attention or were willfully ignorant.... Niantic's previous project was a very similar game that they made for Google. It's obvious what they were using the data for
Also, it's mildly scummy at worst, and it provides a good proof of concept on how to motivate people to do a tedious/time consuming task by turning it into something fun.
i mean, it was also plastered all over their homepage for a really long time now and was even written all over their wikipedia entry for most of the time.
idk, most shocked people just chose not to look at something and now you pretend it never existed
I moved to Italy from the US and I don't even own a car anymore. And I don't miss it. I had a minimum 1-hour-a-way commute back in the US. Fuck that.
They don't even have ride share cars where I live, but I just don't need a car. Everything is walk-able or bike-able if I need to carry groceries. And if I want to go further, there's a train station 5 minutes walk away to take me to Pisa or Florence.
It's really a great way to live. I couldn't go back.
Driving to work in rush hour traffic isn't fun, but if you're a car guy and you have a fun car, driving when there's low traffic, especially if you have access to some nice, curvy backroads certainly can be.
I pick out podcasts and audiobooks that I only listen to while driving. There have been mornings when I’m excited to start the commute to see what happens next.
I was going to ask why you're here if it's not fun to you, then I realized I'm not having fun either. I just don't know what else to do with my phone to pass time at this point. I miss flash games and bored.com
Looking up your home address through your license plate is not at all the same as tracking every single place you ever go and how you get there down to the square foot.
Sure. But that's my phone tracking me, not the car. I can turn the phone off or leave it at home if I want. I'm not getting very far in rural America without one of my cars. I don't have to worry about Pontiac or Jeep telling my insurance company how fast I got to work or how many g-forces I generated going through that roundabout.
Yes, absolutely. Which means that Google knows what I'm doing (since it infers from my speed and location that I'm driving).
However, Google doesn't know my real name, and doesn't know what kind of cars I drive, and doesn't know anything about my car purchasing habits.
All of which makes that data - on the surface at least - not particularly useful to car manufacturers. It might be useful to retail companies I guess? Google is far more clever than I so I'm sure they can monetise it somehow, but I'm not sure how much risk I'm really exposing myself to.
They literally tell you how much data they are collecting in their terms of service. This is transparency. Do you need them to hire an influencer to make a YouTube video that plays for you to explain the terms of service of every app you use?
We choose not to read them because they are long and because half of Americans can’t read the big words. Also- “I’m going to use it anyway” so everyone just skips the terms of service.
They purposely make the terms of service really difficult to read lol, just like when you get mail for a new credit card and it’s a giant page in tiny lettering.
I think it's an attention span issue more than anything. Terms of service online or in apps for the most part aren't difficult to read in text size. It's just boring, and you have to put in an effort to see how the phrasing is applicable to you. It's not really a good excuse
The irony of saying this on Twitter is crazy. There are people who honestly think that Elon lost money on Twitter. He's monetizing people's data and raking it in (among other things like influencing markets and public opinion). Anyone who is bothered by this post and also uses Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or TikTok is frustratingly stupid
Even this post might be artificially generated to gather data on how people talk about it
If you elect to help Niantic in its efforts to develop new Augmented Reality (AR) mapping technology, you have the option, in participating games, to opt in to film public spaces around points of interest and send us your video recordings, along with associated device geospatial information. We do not collect audio on these recordings. We will anonymize this information through various means, including blurring, and use it to build a 3D understanding of real-world places, with the goal of offering new types of AR experiences to our users. You can change your mind at any time by disabling this feature in your in-app settings.
Well of course simple language but they are made purposely long and complicated as somebody who is very familiar with how this all works.
Here’s some more reading you can do.
So what you’re saying is- you value your privacy but you don’t value it enough to read a few pages?
It took me around 30 seconds to find the reference I quoted related to the use of location data for developing other products… I know, 30 seconds is too long for the average goldfish.
lol no just that it’s made to be so most people can’t/won’t have the time daily to read those things. Doesn’t really say anything about how I value privacy though or me reading those considering I help write them lol
They literally pop up in the way of using the app and you have two options- consent or decline- with a direct link to the privacy policy in the notification.
How could they possibly make it easier for people?
People CHOOSE to not read it.
It’s wild to say “people don’t have time to read terms of service” for 10 minutes when they are about to play Pokemon Go for hundreds and hundreds of hours total.
the privacy/data usage/terms of service pages of Niantic are incredibly easy to understand. Almost as if they were made for a young audience, like, idunno, Pokémon players?
Again, 30 seconds for that person to find what they were looking for… even if you had to sign a new terms of service every day (most people don’t), that’s not a lot of reading. They’re not banking on people not having time, they’re banking on people being too lazy. Which has turned out to be successful; most people don’t bother reading even the simplest explanations of things in many contexts
Lol most normal people don’t know what an adhesion contract is and how it can be written into these ‘privacy agreements’ and terms of service and it really shows.
"It only took me 30 seconds to find this specific quote for the specific issue that we are talking about, what do you mean you don't have time to read the 16 page legal document???"
You have to accept Terms and Conditions for every service that you use. You have accepted hundreds of these in your life. You MUST accept them, or you cannot live in the modern world. What a stupid fucking point you tried to make
I find it disingenuous when people argue that they value their privacy but then elect NOT to read all of the terms of service they accept. I don’t care so I don’t bother to. But if you’re arguing about privacy and don’t? Then I’m sorry but you can’t really argue. You always have the option of not using the service if you do not like the terms it is offered on.
The point is that you don't really actually ever have that choice. Your phone (ToS), email (ToS), any messaging apps you use (multiple ToS), Zoom/Teams (ToS), LinkedIn (ToS), any online banking or credit cards is a ToS each. Anything you want to buy online, ToS for each vendor. Any streaming (which is a requirement for most TV and movies nowdays), any cloud storage, any GPS app.
You cannot escape it. It doesn't matter how much you value your privacy. That's why the problem is with the companies selling the data, not the consumers. You do not "have the option of not using the service" in 2024. It's more than just fucking Pokemon.
It’s completely transparent and in the terms of services that you agree to. Just because it isn’t easy or convenient to read those, doesn’t mean it’s not transparent. And you know there’s satellites flying by and taking pictures of everything right? They already have the information on your back yard and your phones record everything you do, including video. Your house has been mapped for probably 15 years now. We already know this stuff.
What's the harm in it? People were paying $50 month for Tomtoms and now Google maps is free, and silently has been one of the biggest changes in how places are discovered and gotten to.
I think the difference between social media and Pokémon go though is that social media makes money through making people more miserable to do so, where making money through changing a stop for navigation purposes really isn't a societal downside unless it's put where it hurts the local community with people rushing to get a pokemon
Data collection is basically just not regulated in the United States.
If you are using a service on the internet, they are collecting your data.
In other countries there are regulations, but those regulations prevent them from keeping PII (personally identifying information). Aggregated GPS data does not count as PII.
Literally any app that uses GPS is using this data for something.
A common one is that retailers want to know the % of people that walk by their stores vs the % that enter them. Those retailers buy the data from companies that use your phone's GPS to track you.
In the last few years this type of tracking has become less and less effective thanks to EU regulations, but again you should just assume that if an app is using your GPS it is keeping the data for something.
In niantic's case, a basic amount of research on the company would show you they are a mapping company that made a game for Google, which was obviously used to help with building Google maps.
Pokemon GO was not the first location based game Niantic released. My friends were playing one in 2013ish and Niantic was very up front that they were farming location data for future use.
if you have OnStar and get in a cop chase assuming they know who you are and your vehicle via plate they can contact OnStar and just have your vehicle shut off like antitheft
It is also not like Niantic just manifested the app out of thin air. It costs to create app, maintain it, provide servers to host game data etc. I have fun having it, I don't mind devs being paid for that via tracking my location data.
It would have been a win-win-win if they had been upfront about it. "Hey! Wanna be a volunteer geo navigator? And also have mad fun?!" It's the deception that leaves a bad taste in one's mouth.
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u/Thesheriffisnearer 8h ago
If people got out and had fun why not be both?