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‘Pokémon Go’ players have been unknowingly training delivery robots
(www.popsci.com)
But you don't understand! Some of those Charizards were shiny!
I feel like that tweet has been written by AI
I agree. Something about llms where they use strange wording like the last sentence or "its not just x its y" type phrases
Nothing is free. All free services are using your data somehow.
If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
In this case, it was mostly children’s data.
If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.
Except most free and open-source software, major open knowledge bases, literally the social media service you're using to communicate this point right now...
While understandable when talking about services by for-profit corporations, this talking point without that context is oversimplified to the point of being obnoxious in a world where I can set up a desktop OS with a fully featured environment and software suite then go browse a social media site where at no stage was anything free where I was the product.
Edit: Moreover, an arguably worse problem with this saying in 2026 is that it implies (doesn't outright state, but implies to an uninformed reader) that paid services can save them from this, which these days is almost universally untrue.
Yeah, I didn’t think I needed to make clear I meant with for profit companies like Nintendo.
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Pokémon Go already has multiple revenue streams, including direct in-app purchases.
I think you are forgetting that Niantic made a lot of money off Pokémon GO, not ALL the money, ergo its an abject failure under capitalism and they need to pump up those numbers.
If they had been making ALL the money they might have been satisfied, for a quarter. Then they would have packaged and sold all that data for more than ALL the money.
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Is the fediverse free?
While the admins and donations make it free, I guarantee there's at least a few corporations or government organizations out there scraping the fediverse to gather data. So even though the people hosting it might not have any bad intentions, an open platform like this will still feed the data hungry machine.
Again, I meant for profit companies, like Nintendo.
Volunteer led orgs are different. Particularly those run by socialists.
e: most volunteer/socialist orgs don’t have ‘customers’.
I don't expect most people still playing Pokémon go are actually kids 😅 I could be wrong, but as someone playing it until pretty recenly and who had friends who still played it at various points I don't think its really popular with kids anymore
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This is - unfortunately - not surprising. Niantic has always been in the business of selling/using user data for profit, they were a spin-off from Google after all. Their first big game, Ingress, was used to train Google Maps.
If anyone ist surprised by that they should look up why niantic was ever founded.
It was always about data collection in the real world.
And this is why you dont take AR scans of pokestops/use ar mode. The free $1 poffin isnt worth the betrayal of the area.
Goofy.
When I played I just spoiled the data. I found out that you can just hold a white piece of paper in front of the camera and bounce your phone lightly up and down to simulate movement (since they want you to walk around the real world location you’re photographing). Other persons I played with just photographed their shoes, so Niantic only had useless photos.
I’d guess the majority of players properly adhered to guidelines when doing AR field research. A small minority probably uploaded useless data.
Hey! Whoa! That's uncalled for!
......Goofy isn't even a Pokemon.
Is this bad? I mean I guess it has the potential to damage delivery workers, but isn’t working for grubhub or doordash already kind of a scam anyway? That’s before we consider that the likelyhood of any product coming to market that could actually successfully do deliveries. Sounds like a job complicated beyond the capabilities of any robot now or in the near future anyway.
It's bad under capitalism, because it means that the ruling class get to keep an even higher percentage of profits.
Under socialism, it's good.
Fully automated luxury gay space communism would be awesome, but until we get socialism, we should take cues from the luddite movement.
.........ok, I was with you until "gay space". Now I'm just confused.
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I thought they were working on getting people to Pokémon Go to the polls!
Holy shit that was almost 10 years ago. Time flies when everyday gets shittier and shittier.
Time flies when you live in a time sucking vacume of existential dread, exacerbated by a deadly global pandemic which was made even worse by a political party trying to prolong the death hoping to gain a political advantage in the then upcoming election.
We live in the dumbest timeline.
I Agree 💯💯💯
All I want is for politics to be something I only have to think about a few months before Election Day. My grandmother who’s in her 80s told me that was the way it was back in the day. Republicans ruined American society all because they are a bunch of stuck up loser bitches and are do nothing good organized criminals.
Republicans ruined American society all because they are a bunch of stuck up loser bitches and are do nothing good organized criminals.
I need this printed on a hoodie.
Hillary did some maximum pandering there, but it worked since I dutifully did Pokémon Go to the Polls.
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I feel like this was common knowledge back in 2016. Is this surprising to anyone?
Yeah I’ve known about this for like 5 years. It’s not at all new.
I am one of the lucky 10,000 today 😄
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This is a reason why you should actually read the Terms of Service and don't use the product if you don't agree with them. Niantic's ability to use your images like this would have been in the ToS.
AI has made this a bit easier since you can copy and paste the ToS into an LLM and ask it summarize the terms and point out the most important clauses (and clauses that aren't typical)
I used the AI to destroy the AI
I don't automatically have a negative opinion about this, I would need more information before that. Did the terms of service allow for this?
It's a fascinating case study on crowdsourcing data that is useful to this navigation technology, and reminds me of the first captchas that helped train OCR engines.
Yeah this is like 90% of all of Google's business model. Captchas to train OCR or tag crosswalks, vehicles, etc. for other computer vision. GOOG-411 to train voice recognition for the Google assistant.
Unknowingly?
Ingress was quite transparent about the goal of gathering real-world data to allows development of future technologies like self-driving and navigation.
It's the reason, why I started playing it around 2012.
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Not even the first alarming issue with Pokemon Go
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this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
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