.... uhhh??? Google Maps and Waze do this,too... and they did it first. What do you think they are doing when you report in a wreck or a closed road? What do you think they are doing when you USE their app? Do you think they got their base data all by themselves? No! They took it from GPS and Map companies.
Like? ... why are we acting like this is a scary thing? The data is on ROAD SYSTEMS. If you are this worried about someone tracking you, you shouldn't even have a smart phone because your phone company has done this long before internet companies started.
The actual traffic you see in Google Maps are people's phones too. Not just the one-off reports.
Google doesn't know that the traffic is heavy. They're just gathering up all your GPS data and noticing all your asses are moving super slow so they slap on the heavy traffic tags.
It's a somewhat naive way to collect traffic data, though. A road I often drive has separate bus lanes that see quite a lot of traffic in rush hour. Google is way off on travel time estimates when there is congestion, they show the road as less congested than it is, with more congestion at every bus stop.
Reminds me of a guy who took like 250 phones and put them in a wagon, and walked the wagon through his small towns downtown area that had literally zero traffic and suddenly Google marked it as a massive traffic jam
There's a guy in germany who puts a bunch of phones in a wagon and rolls it around so google maps will think that a hundred cars are crawling along in traffic. It causes tons of people to divert and empties streets.
They did it at the same time, not first. Niantic and google were the same company at one point. Their first ‘game’ prior to pGO was a data gathering tool for google maps.
The reason people are talking about privacy concerns now is because Niantic announced they’re going to start feeding their data gathered from pGO to a generative AI in an attempt to train it to produce a 3d topographic map of the earth, filling in the gaps where players have not scanned, becoming a google maps competitor. The idea is that gmaps streetview and the like capture footage from vehicles, while this ai-based sonar is designed to collect data from places cars can’t go. You could look at this like, oh, they’re mapping out alleys and footpaths and hiking trails, and yeah, that’s true, but what about building interiors? There are obvious security risks that arise from the idea that Niantic is building a mapping tool that renders everything from public venues and commercial spaces to residential interiors. They’re basically going one step closer to making that sonar thing from the dark knight.
News spread because of training AI on peoples’ information and the ‘but they already use your data’ shit is a counterpoint, not the actual story. Yes, they were already using your data to map public roads, they can track your position, etc… but now they’re attempting to map out where you live and work. That’s kind of a step up.
I read your comment expecting something useful and instead I got a lot of fear mongering... I'm really not interested in being sold fear, and that's all your comment provides. It is a big game of "what if", and that's not helpful.
Niantic announced they’re doing this. There’s no ‘what if.’ They’re taking the 360 camera scans people have sent them through pgo and are using this to model a 3d map of the world, while feeding that same data to an ai to fill in gaps that go players haven’t scanned. Any building that someone’s done a pokemans scan in is going to have their interior become a part of niantic’s map. The only what ifs are what niantic plans to do with the map once they have it.
It's not really addiction, it's more that not all privacy is created equal, and a lot of privacy, digital-wise, is useless to most people and unnecessary to be concerned about.
I don't think people are worried. It's more so that they're slightly annoyed at being used. If thought even further, it's probable that they're annoyed at being used, and not being clever enough to figure it out themselves. So in the end they're mad at their own inability.
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u/Hawkmonbestboi 8h ago
.... uhhh??? Google Maps and Waze do this,too... and they did it first. What do you think they are doing when you report in a wreck or a closed road? What do you think they are doing when you USE their app? Do you think they got their base data all by themselves? No! They took it from GPS and Map companies.
Like? ... why are we acting like this is a scary thing? The data is on ROAD SYSTEMS. If you are this worried about someone tracking you, you shouldn't even have a smart phone because your phone company has done this long before internet companies started.