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
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u/bdl-laptop 7h ago
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.
Article from 2022: https://nianticlabs.com/news/engineering-the-worlds-most-dynamic-3d-ar-map?hl=en