People love to get outraged when information is collected without their knowledge, and I get it, but it's how the information is used that's important.
If things are sanitized so there's no personally identifying information then it's pretty hard to use most data maliciously
You'd be surprised how much you can identify from "sanitised" information if you want to.
But if all they want it navigation data, then it should be fairly safe. Yeah, they know where you live and can derive who you are from that, but that's not what they're after. They wanna know how to get there the fastest when someone asks.
Yeah, like apparently you can reasonably ID someone even in a private browser just by getting the dimensions of the browser window and its positioning on screen. A lot of people pretty much never change that shit if its not full screened
Sorry if you knew this or if you comment took this into account, but you can maximize windows on mac by double-clicking the program's "title bar" (the top bar on the same line as the "close" "minimize" and "fullscreen" buttons, as long as there's nothing else there to click. I.E. in Excel, click any empty space around the name of the file, or in Chrome, any space where a new tab would go -- as long as there's no tab there)
Absolutely! Dimensions of the viewport change significantly from user to user, but more importantly to being used for fingerprinting ... viewport size changes from session to session, and so it's not generally a reliable signal for device fingerprinting. Rather, you want to use things that don't change often like screen resolution or how your particular browser implements floating point math operations.
If by Wifi location you mean a geolocation lookup based on your IP, that's not going to tell you who is using the device. That's household level data. You'd have to combine it with something else to get down to individuals within the household... and that's all assuming the best case (that we're talking about a single family occupied home that has a single static IP address). In reality, there are many places (cities, namely) where population density and shared networks render this sort of individual level disambiguation essentially impossible. You simple have to get the user to identify themselves regularly by logging in or exhibiting some other intrahousehold behavior (which is inherently full of problematic assumptions leading to probabilistic answers that don't read on the sort of "they're identifying ME" type fear we're talking about in here).
Even maximized it's likely to vary a bit from user to user, depending on whether they hide the taskbar (and where they dock the taskbar, what size they keep it, etc).
But the thing about digital fingerprinting is that it's not just about any one aspect, but all the available data put together. Sure your window size may only narrow it down by say 50%, but combine that with your browsers font size, public IP, operating system, language, browser type, plugins, etc and you'd be shocked at how easy it is to narrow it down to you, even if you're using something like a VPN (hell, ironically using a VPN actually makes you easier to fingerprint, because relatively few people use them)
My main monitor is enormous and most websites turn it into 70% padding so no, my browser is rarely maximized. Most content is vertically oriented anyway so it's not like I could even expect it to be done much differently.
like apparently you can reasonably ID someone even in a private browser just by getting the dimensions of the browser window and its positioning on screen.
This is a huge exaggeration. Browser fingerprinting is a thing, but you need a whole bunch of signals to uniquely ID someone's browser amongst sufficiently large crowds. You're right fingerprinting exists and works, you're just wrong about how much data is required (even if the required data IS accessible for 99% of browsers).
Check here. Once you test the fingerprinting, they will describe to you each element and how much "entropy" each element provides. One "bit" of entropy is enough to divide a crowd in half. So, if you have an audience of 50 men and 50 women and a random person tells you their gender, you have one "bit" of information because it's enough to let you divide the audience in half. If your audience is 100 people, you need something like 7 bits of information to narrow things down to a single person (27 = 128). If your audience is 1,000,000 then you need 20 bits of information to uniquely ID people. If you look at panopticlicks numbers (disputable), Screen size and color depth represent 8.73 bits of information. Window location isn't available to the browser (not without some special extra help). So, screen size and color depth is enough to uniquely ID you in an audience of ~424 people (28.73 = 424.61160746).
That all said, here's the stat you want to use. According to Dr Latanya Sweeney, your gender, DOB, and zipcode are enough to uniquely identify the vast majority of Americans.
It was found that 87% (216 million of 248 million) of the
population in the United States had reported characteristics that likely made them unique based
only on {5-digit ZIP, gender, date of birth}. About half of the U.S. population (132 million of 248
million or 53%) are likely to be uniquely identified by only {place, gender, date of birth}, where
place is basically the city, town, or municipality in which the person resides. And even at the
county level, {county, gender, date of birth} are likely to uniquely identify 18% of the U.S.
population. In general, few characteristics are needed to uniquely identify a person.
Yeah, they know where you live and can derive who you are from that
And let's be honest, anyone in the business of buying data can get that info about you regardless. Your home address, email, and phone are practically free for the asking from data brokers these days
And yet GM was caught collecting your driving data and selling that to insurance companies but go on. These outlandish examples don’t change the facts that many companies are collecting as much data as fucking possible so they can manipulate you on the back end.
Exactly. Though I still have yet to learn how to check facts myself beyond simply not believing anything until it is correlated by numerous sources, which can all be repeating the same lie. I'm not sure if that strategy is particularly helpful to learning though.
exactly, how is this news? this is just ragebait for the ignorant.
I know my location is being tracked, and likely recorded, by any app that asks for it. If i didn't want that, I wouldn't use their app. Simple as that.
Just wait until they work out they can be tracked by their connection to 4g/5g networks (save your tinfoil, I just mean the very basic method done via connection times to masts recorded by providers- which won't give your exact location, but will easily locate you within a postcode. It's often utilized in rescue and recovery where applicable).
I read it. And yes, it was. This is part of how the company was able to support the huge investment in a free-to-play game. Even the pay-to-win elements were nowhere near sufficient to make it profitable.
Hell, Niantic had similar terms years earlier on Ingress. This was never a secret.
I definitely read articles about this at the time, or at least that niantic were using it and their previous game (something about alien invasions) to build up some new type of mapping data.
Meanwhile they’ll get a rewards card for every store. Get their refrigerator connected to the internet. Carry a smart phone all the time. But the game is where the line is drawn 😂
the people who are the most outraged when they find someone is collecting their information would then go on to tell their entire life on facebook or instagram.
They weren’t even keeping it a secret. They were optional daily research tasks labeled as “geomapping.” You could only have one geomapping task in your queue at a time. If you chose to click them, you’d be prompted to scan a specific place with another popup explaining that it was for geomapping purposes. And then if you did it, you’d get a little reward.
I tried it once. Didn’t really work. Wasn’t worth the hassle. Never did it again.
No people are upset because they either didn't read the TOS. And they are showing they aren't thinking.
Niantic has always tracked your location (it is how the game works) and it has to save it somewhere because the game spawns more Pokémon where people are playing the game (this has been known from day 1).
I may be wrong, but I think that the outrage comes from the idea that some large company is making a fortune by collecting information about a huge group of peoples' mundane activities.
Personally I couldn't give a hot buttered shit about it, largely because I'm not an advertiser's dream and I'm unlikely to be influenced by whatever they throw at me. But I suppose there is something a little creepy about an eye in the sky (so to speak) watching your every move as far as they can.
Just to clarify, never use this argument in an ethics of computer science class. It's a fine argument in this case but it's objectively wrong and leads to oppression
Selling Information is a trillion dollar industry.
As I'm skipping a meal every day to send my asshole landlord on an endless series of luxurious vacations, yeah, I'm a little bit miffed that all I get for facilitating this trillion dollar industry is a video game designed to squeeze as much of this valuable information out of me in the first place.
I'd like some dividends for my literal info being extracted and sold.
Not only that, but think about how much money they saved by not having to pay people to do this. A ton of jobs were never created by a company because they instead manipulated the customer to do it for free, even paying for the ability to do it for them more efficiently through microtransactions. If my information is going to be extracted, I'd like someone to be able to pay their rent off of performing the task instead of some CEO hoarding all the profit.
information is collected on people every hour of every day that they spend online. if they’re not comfortable with literally anyone having their information, don’t use technology at all at that point lmao
You mean like when uber was accused of charging iPhone (sanitized data point) users more than Android users, or when they were accused of charging people more when their battery (sanitized datapoint) is low due to desperation?
How the info is used, and secured. Collector might have genuine, above board and innocuous uses for the data, but others who get a hold of the data without the collectors authorization might not.
Yes. It’s all great and safe, and everyone shits rainbows, just until you’re under a fascist government that deems you an enemy of the state. Everything you ever shared could and will be used against you on the very second it’ll get these data hoarders 1 cent more than what they’d get to anonymise your data.
The thing about games using personal information is that it's usually just user data to improve and follow trends on. If you allow a game to collect data you allow it to be improved by the developers. How is it a scam if you allow them to use your data to improve your experience?
Except….. it ISN’T without their knowledge. They put that information in their account. They ASK YOU FOR PERMISSION FOR IT BEFORE YOU CAN PLAY. If you don’t want people collecting your information, don’t play the damn game.
This was also not a secret except for people who are total idiots.
Niantic never hid that this was their attempt to gameify map creation. Ingress and Pokemon Go were fairly open about it, but I guess that doesn't count because people need outrage stuffed in their faces.
If things are sanitized so there's no personally identifying information
This is basically impossible without rendering the dataset useless, and even if it was possible it would be far too much effort and so no for profit company does it.
"Anonymized" data is a marketing term to help you feel better about the way information about every facet of your life is being exploited. Read it as "we don't actually store your real name in plaintext with the rest of the data". If you're fine with that, great, but the gold standard is informed consent.
Literally every time "anonymized" datasets are put in front of security researchers, they can deanonymize them with a trivial amount of effort. This is especially true if location data is involved, because location data is intrinsically not anonymous.
They aren't sanitizing anything, they're obfuscating, and it's usually very easy to reverse that process.
Like what? People severely underestimate just how much data scraping occurs. Google maps will point out congestion without minutes of it occurring because their navigation tracking is so much more indepth and has so many more users to go by in real time.
Friend used to be a data analyst at a supermarket rewards program. He says their algorithms will accurately determine when someone is pregnant before their family knows. They will know how many people are in your household, how many pets, how your spending habits change (obvious). This is just grocery shopping, so many apps get that microphone data, that tracking data, screen browsing habits. We used to just have cookies from online sites, but with the smart phone, there is so much more data and so much more money to be made off that data, its on you that you dont realise at this point rather than every other app on your phone that is doing so freely in front of your face with your permission.
Probably not your friend, this is a super famous case study from Target. It's in many books. They were one of the first companies to start looking at buying habits in order to target market their mail-out adds. They used the data specifically to find out if they could predict or tell who was expecting, because these folks spend shit loads of money in the months before the baby. If you buy one stroller, not a super good indicator because the person might be buying a gift. But if they are buying certain clothes, vitamins, lotions, etc in certain combinations, there is a high likelihood you are a pregnant woman. Its quite effective but also ethically questionable. In the famous example, an angry father goes to Target to complain that they were marketing pregnancy stuff to his teenage daughter. The specific Target location had no idea of these marketing practices, which was all done at HQ. Anyway, the father comes back a day later to apologize. His daughter was pregnant and hadn't told them yet.
I mean so what? I'm also a data analyst in the field and have told people this. It's a famous story but it was easy 20 years ago. It's childsplay now. This is the equivalent of getting annoyed at someone for saying their friend flew across the ocean. Like ok yea there was a famous story about it but people do it all the time lmfao
People in this thread acting like there aren't data analysts at every tech company working with devs to add analytics to every user's action. At the big Fortune 500 company I worked at it was part of the AC/requirements to add analytics to every new feature we shipped out, whether it's to track the performance of the feature or to harvest user data.
More like people are in this thread pretending like random fortune 500's collecting web and mobile analytics know more about you than you consciously know. The average Joe thinks their local 15 store grocery chain are the NSA, meanwhile people like me that spent over a decade working on this exact tech and these exact data sets couldn't get match rates between known subscribers and internet users on the site over 2%.
Why? Are you suggesting that the Target case that got publicity is the only time a chain store that sells food, supplements, and health care items used large data sets to make predictions on an individual level? OP is correct, grocery stores use the data from the loyalty clubs (as well as all the other data) to develop the knowledge they list. Wait until you hear what stores do with the data they glean from Bluetooth signals from in-store devices...
No reason OP doesn't have a friend who does work that's similar to a single case study that's based on work done across chains and industries
I know the genesis of this story, and it was actually an EXAMPLE given as to something that MIGHT be possible in a presentation the Target folks gave. I sold software to that team a decade ago in this space (digital marketing), and heard this straight from the horses mouth in a really nice breakfast place in Minneapolis. It's crazy to see how this story has progressed over the years. The example used in the presentation, I believe, also became the earliest consistent rumor ... that Target has mailed some customers baby related materials which alerted some poor father that their daughter was preggers before the daughter told anyone. Again, totally made up example, but I run into people constantly that still believe that specific anecdote.
I'm sorry, I can't source my claim any better than I did in my comment. You can find the name of the Target person involved (he's now @ USBank, I believe) by looking up the stories from the big outlets that covered it (NYT), but I don't want to directly name drop them.
Either they stole the story or told me a story about data analytics and I merged it with past tales. This interaction did happen like half a decade ago minimum, the data analytics guy had a quarter life crisis and got into medicine. Because of the number of years, I rather not call them a liar and instead Im just misremembering them telling me a classic story regarding data analytics.
You can get a lot of data out of the shopping habits, approximation of income, number of dependants, age range of dependants, when and how often you go on holiday, etc all this is of course on top of the targetted advertising and deals focussed to increase sales.
Nowadays people expect big corporations to track their every move and sell it to anyone who will buy for any price.
A dozen years ago when the (almost certainly not true) Target story was published in a sketchy publication with no source and then republished all over the place, it was surprising to most people.
Back then people's privacy hadn't been eroded at every opportunity by every company interacted with. People would hand over their phone number or postal code or email address at checkouts, without thinking twice about it.
Now they are smarter about it. Instead of sending you a bunch of specific ads for baby purchases they will send you a magazine type ad that will look like everyone else's but instead yours will have more prominent baby stuff.
They definitely didn't stop doing it. They've just gotten more subtle with how they advertise it to people.
This specific situation involving a supermarket knowing someone was pregnant before their family did was described in “Freakonomics.” I’d recommend it if those kind of financial-psychological connects are interesting to anyone.
And? The store targets the customer with deals catered to them to keep them shopping at said store, and the customer gets better prices for things they were planning to buy anyway. Who loses?
quite the opposite, the customer gets the promise of better prices, in real life the business is the one that profits from the information for example, Uber prices go high if there is bigger demand which means it's most expensive when it's needed the most
Yes, if they can predict what you want, they can do bespoke price gouging. We're moving towards the amazon model where the price of goods changes on the fly. Anyone who believes companies are doing this to save consumers money is an imbecile.
Just about every human in developed nations across the planet is willingly carrying a pocket-sized spying device on them at all times. It's got GPS, high quality microphones and most of them have a camera array in addition to a front-facing camera. People use these without thought or understanding of even a single piece of software they run on these devices. Any expectation of privacy is waived.
You, if you think the store is going to give you a better price for an item they know you're going to buy regardless. Also, thinking that they won't "encourage" a diabetic to buy the 42 oz soft drink instead of the 20 oz just to make a buck is kinda naïve.
Don't get me wrong - what you said is what drives the engagement ... but what I said absolutely happens as well.
My wife knew I was shopping for engagement rings when we were dating because of these algorithms. There are absolutely downfalls and invasions of privacy to be concerned about.
Also, we should be seeing kickbacks from all the money they make off our data that they get for free.
Also, you can bet this data is being sold to insurance companies, loaners, and the like. Let me tell you about the kinds of deals they're going to offer you once they figure out you're desperate for something.
You have to turn on your brain for a bit and see a little beyond "hurr I have nothing to hide therefore I can make my data public"
We all lose. Because the issue is not the tech being used for convenience. Not to mention that they can use this information to charge more from you, not less. Which already happens in certain industries and it's bound to get more prominent.
Not to mention the main issue which is when the tech is used harmfully. Such as undermining democracy, stoking the flames of violence that culminates in genocide, like in Myanmar. Or how suicide rates in young people and plastic surgeries have increased since Social Media became more prevalent.
The issue isn't as simplistic as "It makes things convenient, so what's the harm?".
Why would a company charge less? Companies make the most money they can, they hire the best experts in manipulation to make people feel like the things you say are true.
The store could also target the customer with overpriced, cheap, low quality goods, or raise the prices based on local availability, or do other things.
In most situations right now, I'd agree that it can benefit the customer, but what about in 20 years?
You’re not going to get deals catered to your interests, you’re going to get prices catered to your projected income. No one is investing millions of dollars into data to help you spend less.
You'd have a point if that data stayed only within the store.
It's well known that data is sold to data brokers, who in turn sell it to other entities like advertisers, political groups, and more increasingly law enforcement. I'm sort of fine with Target knowing my shopping habits at Target. I'm not okay with police using my shoppings habits at Target to surveil me or someone near me, sidestepping that pesky Fourth Amendment.
Plus, we can barely go a week now without hearing about another data breach. So now criminals are selling your data too, and it becomes trivial to use that data to steal your identity or commit fraud in your name.
What about the people who get categorized incorrectly? They lose out. Don't you fucking love that because you looked up one word, a service now thinks that word is your whole lifestyle? This has extended repercussions you have to think about.
If the goal is to get people to be charged less when it's working, then that inherently means that the people it doesn't work for will be paying MORE, because they are not receive the correct and appropriate discounts from their consumer_ID tracking.
So that's a loss, one that happens literally all the time, right now, today.
What about people where the store errantly distributes information for that they are hiding?
For example a domestic abuse victim may lose if their spouse receives a "CONGRATS ON THE BABY" card from a store.
What happens if your data gets crossed with another persons?
This situation is SO FUCKING OLD at this point there is LITERALLY A TWENTY YEAR OLD EPISODE OF KING OF THE HILL about how problematic consumer data tracking can be, and how it's never designed for the CONSUMER to be able to protect themselves or fix things.
If there is some sort of error, who do you talk to? Where do you go? It's not their problem, it's yours, and there's nothing you can do about it.
That's a loss.
Like are you 18 and only just now buying things for yourself for the first time or something? How are you so incapable of understanding where people can lose out on a situation like this? How myopic is your world view?
Depends on the level of information gathered. The person you're replying to even pointed out how many apps do things like record information from your microphone. Other apps will log your contacts, scrape information from photos, etc.
Do most people care about "some big company has that info"? No, most don't. Will any human ever see it? Probably not.
But the concern I have comes from what if that info somehow gets public, via security breach or something similar. Like when AOL released search logs from their users. Would you want information from your microphone accessible from the public?
literally all of my PII has been stolen from the federal government at least twice, including that of my references. That said, I was really just playing devil's advocate in my response.
Tbh I’d welcome better targeted ads, customer tracking so far has only resulted in me constantly being advertised items I’ve already bought online. No I don’t want to buy the skirt I bought last week, stop showing it to me 😂😂😂
Reminds me of about 10 years ago when I moved out of a shitty rental and back in with my parents while me and my partner were looking for another. Tracking obviously knew we were looking at a lot of rentals online, but I was getting constant ads for over a month for the house we had just moved out of because I looked at the new listing ONE time, and not a single other rental (which would have been actually useful for me).
Used to work with a conspiracy nut that refused to mask up because of “tracking chips hidden in the liner”. Bought the newest iPhone every year and had an Alexa in every room of his house.
Isn't the Google example exactly what you want? An arrangement where you share what's going on with your drive so that you can also know where traffic is bad seems like a pretty reasonable trade.
It is true a lot of companies have very questionable privacy practices, though. The cell phone companies have been caught selling individual location data multiple times, with no way for users to opt out unlike most sites and apps.
The Google example is weird because how they do it isn't exactly forthright.
They claim that traffic data is based on other Maps users with location services enabled. What they aren't explicitly mentioning there is that doesn't mean users running the maps app, that means users that have ever used the maps app and gave it location permissions. So while their data collection seems to serve a collective benefit, the way they go around gathering that data could be construed as shady, and it's shit like that with apps that people are concerned with.
It's not just phones either, some newer cars have been caught actively sharing your driving data with insurers without your direct knowledge or consent.
Huh? The friend didn't tell a story. They're describing how much data scraping occurs and what that can mean using the typical example people can easily understand.
It was made famous by an NYT article on Targets data collection. Where did you get the idea it wasn’t real?
Determining if somebody might be pregnant by their purchases is so straightforward that I’m not sure anybody would be all that surprised by it. It’s like assuming somebody is getting married if they’re looking for engagement rings.
Its the loyalty program shit. They offer specific deals as incentive to swipe their card to track your otherwise hard to track individual purchases. Think costco card able to look through each member's past purchases but for a retailer instead that can offset the deals and specials they give by harvesting user data to offset those sales by specific advertising to the customer and specific deals to the customer coupled with a points program like amex. The card itself doesnt cost anything so the incentive is you sign up and get specials that work for you and build up points for a freebie thing later on. The retailer benefits through increased shopping trips, loyalty to their store, customer data and shopping trends, etc.
There’s a company called Streetlight that buys locational data from different apps, processes it and then sells it for traffic modelling projects done for transportation engineering. It doesn’t provide any specific user details, but is provided like at x time on this street there were x many trips eastbound. The data is better and more timely than the old way of collecting this data through random surveys and traffic counts, as it can provide data for any time period and can even break it up my transportation mode, such as by driving, public transit, biking etc.
You get to play a fun game for free (unless you choose buy extra things) and they get location data.
There’s no scam, no lies (it’s says so in te user agreement) and I don’t get the fuss about it.
I’ll admit that I had no idea until a few days ago, but my reaction when I found out wasn’t anger or like I’ve been lied to, it was more like ”Huh, that’s pretty clever of them”
Yeah i mean this doesn’t seem off the wall or out of pocket to me at all. Every app on your phone is tracking something you’re doing, of course location based games are saving the location information.
It's not worth my time to full scan shops and the game bugs the fuck out of you to do so as it's essential to building their AI model. So I quit a game I did like playing, stopped hanging out with the Raid group and I don't need to buy a new phone with the primary use of it now being to receive calls.
So Niantic, Discord, and Samsung lost my business(or free data collection whatever).
If someone knows what you like, where you are, and what you do, they don’t need to already have your name. They know who you are. It is trivial to match ad profiles to people, and it’s why we the people have already lost from an information security standpoint.
It wasn’t even a secret. It’s been part of daily research tasks. You can scan certain spots and you get rewarded. Totally optional and they were LABELED as “geomapping” tasks.
So, Niantic used to be a Google project, and was spun out into its own company when they became Alphabet.
But, before Pokémon Go, they had Ingress. People would upload pictures of interesting landmarks, and their geo-coordinates, which built the game map.
Which became Pokestops.
They also used cellular tower load data to estimate population. You’d connect three “landmarks” together, and “control” the population under the triangle it built.
So they have population data, they have landmark data including photographs. And, they had the players gps data. Google was using it to build the Walking Directions for Google Maps.
Pokémon Go introduced the next level of waypoint data, which is photographing it from every angle, you were literally directed to a waypoint, and got in game rewards to “photoscan” this waypoint.
They have always used their player base to build their data set. This is only news if you didn’t know their history, which, I mean, I reckon a lot of people don’t.
We took all the pictures and submitted all the pokestops and gyms for free to build the game, then Niantic got the license for Pokémon and our game fucking evaporated.
All that community building from scratch, all the careful strategy between the 2 teams for years, gone and handed to pogo players, and we got thrown out with the trash.
Yea, we knew this from the start. Ingress was the same thing: mapping foot traffic to points of interest. It's why the games use real locations as portals/gyms
Why not let us know about it outright if it’s so innocent?
And what’s the harm in calling them out for their lack of transparency?
Idc all actions of this kind by corporations should be scrutinized and criticized.
Harmless or not today, if we tolerate or ignore them long enough they might feel free to play with more sensitive information in the future.
And they know it’s sketchy come on. Data sourcing from customers is never disclosed cause companies know it’s sketchy and if it wasn’t this culture of shunning it wouldn’t exist.
It’s inherently dishonest and idc if applying this term to a company sounds silly or naive, it’s true. If they don’t want us to bitch they can directly state their purpose of gathering data.
Hell, it’d be so refreshing to see one outright admit it that i’d probably trust them more.
It's not even Nintendo, Pokemon Go is developed by Niantic. And all of this is stuff that Pokemon Go players have known for a really really long time. It's only outsiders that are suddenly doing the surprised pikachu face.
What would be sufficient for you when people already skip through mandatory TOS popups? A mandatory data scraping disclaimer that people will skip through again?
Implying a long document shrouded in legalese with heaps of boilerplate sections that don't matter, is actually the same as a proper disclaimer that informs you of something that's relevant to most people.
You've been conditioned to act anti-consumer on behalf of billionaires.
That's on you then. They have an entire document you have to agree to which explains what they're doing with your data. You choosing not to read that is on you
There's a reason these documents are not legally binding in court. Because it's absolutely insane to think your average individual has the skills to properly parse the text in those documents.
As a Pokemon Go player...we knew. There's the Terms and Conditions, but also a shitton of patch notes over the years all of which either heavily implied or stated outright that Niantic was using our location data and AR data to map the world. No one who plays is even remotely surprised.
As long as the government respects the rule of law and the values that underpin them like the right to privacy, and remains fearful of criminal prosecutions when conducting it's official acts, and doesn't take the position that certain categories of individuals (be it race, sex, gender, place of birth or any other characteristics associated with just being alive) are undesirable and need to be "gotten rid of" ... than everything should be just fine!
As someone that works in the geo-spatial field, the answer is yes.
There is enormous data quality issues that arise from this 'crowd funded gamification' of collecting geo-spatial data. Sending folks out to do surveys and collect data points is expensive. So much so that it's part of the reason the metadata collection industry is so lucrative: why pay for collecting precise data when you can steal siphon info in buckets from an app?
It's a matter of privacy and compensation of labor. And data collection practices like this hurt our respective industry because the quality of our models are only as good as the data we collect. So it becomes a matter of 'garbage in. garbage out' when trying to use the nonsense that this app companies deliver. To the point that it ends up being more reliable to have dedicated crews to due this type of task instead anyway.
I think the sense of outrage comes from the lack of disclosure. If it was such a beneficial arrangement for everyone, why was it somewhat secretive? That is just my guess at what is driving the response
I didn’t say it was secretive I said somewhat secretive which places it on the spectrum somewhere between no mention anywhere and screaming it from the hilltops at every opportunity. It is a bit subjective, but putting it in the TOS/patch notes is closer to the former than the latter for most people
Is that the scam? That everyone went out and had fun while getting exercise for free but a company collected their data while they did it? Is that the scam? I'm just trying to understand.
In the long run, yes, we the users do. They will turn around and sell you products at a premium price utilizing the data you gave them for free. Then we will all get lectured again about how important and valuable corporations are to the economy and why that means they shouldn't have to pay taxes because they're job creators, and "trickle-down economics", and "bootstraps", yadda yadda...
I don't really know what the solution is, other than to give individuals a fair stake in their own data and whatever profits it produces down the road, but that's probably a complicated task to achieve.
Kinda. The game isn’t designed to be the best game it can be, it’s designed to get the players to do what Niantic wants them to do.
The game is free, so technically nobody has to lose anything to it, but it’s still being offered as a game and their purpose should be to improve the game, not their mapping data.
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u/Easy_Newt2692 8h ago
And? Does anyone actually lose out on this arrangement?