Hmm, what does ingress players train? AI for a civil war?
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2026
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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
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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.
Most people just want to collect Pokemon and don't read up on what the company that made the app is doing.
Yeah I'm perfectly fine telling Big Data that where I walk is a walkable path or that the PoIs I pass exist there. There are just as many positive uses of that info as negative.
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.
Yeah, revised version:
If you're not paying you're the product. If you are paying you're still the product and paying for the privilege*.
- Except for not for profit software / platforms.
Humm, that's not as pithy.
Pokémon Go already has multiple revenue streams, including direct in-app purchases.
Yeah, but many players don’t pay, especially the huge player bases of children. They can subsidise that by selling your data.
Pokemon go has been extremely profitable, the free to play model works. They don't need to subsidize shit.
Free to play games work by being pay2win and by catering to whales. Sorry but you are wrong.
I’ve been in software design and development for decades. Sorry, but you are wrong.
The reason these companies are so profitable is because they sell your data.
Whales are fine, but that’s not their only revenue stream. People freely give up their data to them and that’s stupidly valuable. If you think these companies aren’t selling it, you’re very naive.
And to be clear, you’re saying this in response to an article pointing out they’ve been selling your data.
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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.
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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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.
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.
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.
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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.
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Not even the first alarming issue with Pokemon Go
Nothing is free and everything will be stored.
AI already knows who you are online only the few can see those results but you bet your ass they are making machine generated profiles of you to sell ads.
Ephemeral communication is only way forward.
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.
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Hillary did some maximum pandering there, but it worked since I dutifully did Pokémon Go to the Polls.
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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)
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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.
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