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Pokémon Go players are altering public map data to catch rare Pokémon
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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I was not aware of this used to open street maps at all. I thought it was based on Google Maps. Still.
If they used Google maps, Niantic would have to pay Google. That's no Bueno. Why pay for content critical to your apps success when you could just freeload on volunteers work instead?
I know this seems like Niantic is free-loading, but this is intentionally-allowed by the ODbL license and honestly, might be a good business decision even without considering the licensing fees. OSM is almost 20 years old and as a community led project, is probably more predictable and stable than a Google license which could change drastically from one contract to the next.
As a OSM contributor, I'm more than happy to see my work used this way, and as @QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world pointed out, OSM has seen a lot of benefit too.
Yeah, and the consequence of them using the dataset is massive amounts of people contribute useful data to the project. It is a fair exchange in my opinion. There are lots of reasons to hate Pokemon Go, but this isn't one of them. You can use the maps too, and they are far better as a result of PGO using them.
Don't get any changes reviewed before , you know, really replacing map data ? I'm just curious. There are a lot of players worldwide, I can imagine the game going strong for another few years and OSM ending up choke full of areas that were pokemon'd and made unusable.
"Made unusable": that's not how it works. Even with occasional vandalism, there's so much more people positively contributing, that overall the map just keeps on getting better and better.
I'm a pretty junior contributor (I spent a couple years completing quests on StreetComplete and only have been adding new buildings, etc for a few weeks). I don't know a ton about how the organization is run, so I can only talk from my experiences. I've been able to upload changes which will be live before they will be reviewed. I know there are reviewers who go through areas regularly, but they definitely don't cover everywhere. I'm not sure if OSM has the ability to lockdown areas with frequent vandalism.
From what I can tell, changes are just uploaded immediately. I think If someone adds wrong data, another contributor can revert it.