Niantic spinoff, Niantic Spatial, used over 30 billion images taken by users of Pokemon Go to train its “visual positioning” system to help robots navigate the world.
Does it means that they collected pictures from inside people’s home?
It means they collected pictures from wherever the app took pictures.
I haven’t used the app, my understanding is they send you to specific public areas to collect the images. But anywhere you gave the app camera permissions could’ve had pictures taken.
Unlikely in homes, but definitely on private property, including some folks’ yards.
This isn’t a huge surprise I don’t think. Ninantic was an offshoot of Google to some degree. They were using the photos to train as soon as it started, I believe. That app was designed to be spyware and data collection all along. Age of Surveillance Capitalism has a small section on them.
Doesn’t make this not awful, but kind of par for the course.
i wonder if they managed to take out all the data of users who spoofed their location to catch ‘em
Wasn’t Pokemon Go being used for spying on either Belarus or Russian military bases years ago?
It looks like the Belarusian government claimed that but there wasn’t any evidence:
Pretty clear now it was used for training this big dataset for AI.
I remember seeing some concrete evidence after the claim was made but don’t want to spend the time looking for it.