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Comments (112)

• JumpCrisscross
  There seems to be low-hanging political fruit here.Governments have a say on to whom their weapons manufacturers sell weapons. It should be ditto for geospatial intelligence. If you want to map geospatial data in the Netherlands, you get a license from them and store the data locally and have to get permission to exfiltrate.This won’t stop exfiltration, of course. But it should slow it down, which in the world of geospatial intel, could mean the difference between a drone finding its target and getting lost because of new construction.
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  ccppurcell
  If you are looking for something to channel that energy into, you could help improve open street map using streetcomplete: https://streetcomplete.app/
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  relyks
  I stopped scanning pokestops because the effort has outweighed the rewards. A lot of the time, the requests show up as "research tasks" for a point of interest that I quickly passed by and have no interest in returning to, besides the tasks related to taking pictures of your buddy pokemon in augmented reality. Looks like I made the right choice by stopping. They do indicate to you up front that they will use the data, but it's still kind of terrible that you could be indirectly contributing to war efforts. I always assumed the data would be used for large world model training or simulations.
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  adrianhon
  This article is based on reporting from Trouw: https://www.trouw.nl/redactie/PokemonGo/I was interviewed for the Trouw piece and briefly quoted. This isn't to detract from the DroneXL piece, which adds its own angle.
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  Frieren
  Kids training drones that will kill other kids.There is a level of evilness on that difficult to grasp. What kind of society puts that burthen on their own children?Inequality has given power to the few deranged and depraved. No ethics, no morality, just self gratification and excess.
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  pj_mukh
  As someone who works in this space, the headline is a bit of a stretch. The overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone heavy theaters of war is a tiny sliver (or zero?).The military contractor (Vantar/Maxar) in question basically admits so but just "reserves the right" to use the data which is the political battle line ala Claude and DoD.This is mostly an ideological battle.
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  petterroea
  This shouldn't be a surprise. But at this point it feels like if you don't completely avoid participating in digital society, your data will be used against you or groups/countries you support.
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  chinathrow
  > Hanke formed Niantic Labs inside Google in 2010, then spun it out in 2015.Spyware company spawns a new spyware company.
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  wartywhoa23
  An interesting thing is that in Russia, this military data grab by ostensibly 'our western would-be enemies" was supported by viral advertisement by nobody else but the head of Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill.A story was manufactured about arresting a 22 y.o. guy in the Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints for playing Pokemon Go.The story went hyper-hyped for weeks, with general public sentiment that once such an obscurant retrograde declares such an innocent game so evil, it must be something to absolutely install and play in spite!And such was the way of the Pokemon Go's viral success in Russia.(edits for factual precision)
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  emperorxanu
  I still feel like this is a perfect example of why we should be asking for our data to be disclosed to the public. If I take a picture of some public point of interest, they end up tagging it with their metadata and selling it, well, that's what I agreed to by not reading 20 pages of T&C's right?But the value in that data is in the liveliness right, so at some point, would it not make sense for that data to be considered a public asset?Why do we not demand this data be released regularly (given that the inverse tech could be developed using this as well)? If it can be used to train things used for war, could it not equally be used to train better lifesaving tech (in which case, the data should be made available to the public)?
• mawadev
  Incredible how Nintendo is okay with this
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  superkickstart
  The world is so messed up right now that this is not even the least bit surprising. In fact it's on point.
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  KaiserPro
  I worked at a VPS competitor of niantic.I am conflicted on this report.1) VPS is not new, the startup I worked at had a working public system in 2018.2) The hard part about VPSs is not actually the navigation, its generating and querying the map.How does the VPS work?You build a point cloud of features (for us we paid people to go and record videos in cities, Tesla/Waymo/toyata/google drove cars niantic got it's players to take videos/pictures)Align that point cloud to the 3d world, store it in a way that can be queried quickly (doing that quickly and at scale is still an area of research)Then your client needs to extract the keypoints from an image and perform triangulation against the map to see where the camera was taken (There are calibration issues, but we ain't got time for that)Now.Niantic, from what I can see (and its been a while) has a database of key landmarks, but not of the areas inbetween. For decent navigation I would say that this is a massive problem.I know niantic are pushing the whole "spatial world model" but frankly I don't think that scales. They stuff they have released is memorybound in vGPUs which isn't that useful for realtime querying.I strongly suspect that actually they have a different system, much more traditional along the lines of colmap, or hloc, or something with a feedforward model in it.However for the drone usercase, what you actually want is SLAM, which is a very different problem. for SLAM you need to build the map whilst your are moving, and then try and do loop closure or some other method to stop drift. Once you've gone there and back you can use that model for relocaliosation.
• Larrikin
  I'm glad I always quickly scanned the dirt. At some point I gave up completely when I heard they started banning people for dirt scans.In the latest season they've gotten rid of the scan rewards, so I guess they got all the data they needed.
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  leni536
  Pokémon being used for war efforts is prime South Park material, too bad they already did that.
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  yanhangyhy
  i remerber china bans it many years ago... and many people dont understand why.... never trust a USA product!and we even have youtube videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiJOHV9rIxU
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  mcosta
  It is even worse, tax money is used for the military.
• cheschire
  https://archive.is/0WxtP
• vrganj
  August 2016: Iran Becomes First Country to Ban Pokémon GOhttps://www.avclub.com/iran-becomes-first-country-to-ban-pok...Really smart decision, in hindsight.
• close04
  > The games went to a Saudi sovereign wealth fund. The map went to defense.The map went to offense. Nobody needs scans of someone else's country for "defense".At this point it's a given that any data source that can bring an edge in a conflict is being used for exactly that. Things that film and scan surroundings are the newest addition. When a fleet of cars is taking cm or mm resolution scans of entire cities or even countries the safe assumption is that the data is funneled for intelligence and military purposes.
• Utilera
  Once the data has trained a model, it also becomes almost impossible to meaningfully audit or undo
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  wartywhoa23
  Where are all the edgelords sending me cuckoo signs and tagging me as conspiracy theorist when I said that it compiles photogrammetry by placing pokemons at areas and angles with low image coverage?Ah, oh yes, "we all knew it from the start", "they indicated that up front" etc.Fuck no, everyone was foaming at the mouth how it's just a game and no way in hell an intelligence operation.P.S. Those who "knew it from the start" yet continued helping Niantic, did you really think that the data will be used for the greater good of the humankind?
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  tomaytotomato
  How useful is spatial data over time, does it decay or age much?Is the geographical data more useful, or are buildings and other structures more important?Genuinely don't know much in this space.
• wiseowise
  This is all for your security! Right? Right…?
• lmf4lol
  And here I am, trying to make our product as privacy friendly as possible. Trying to follow GDPR and the AI act. Trying to respect my users..And then there are those guys... and they make billions, by giving a flying f*ck about ethics or what so ever. And NO ONE will hold them accountable. NO ONE! Because either they lack the power, or they are bought and in it on the scheme.I accept that the world is like that. Just like International Law has always been nothing more than an academic exercise, business doesnt care about anyone besides profit. Its fine. Its just sad also...
• keybored
  I keep being negative about Digital Tech in general[1]. But this is worse than my habitual negativity towards D. Tech sans AI (AI is a whole chapter onto itself).And what can be done? The comments usually say a big fat nothing.- Any fool already knew this comments: “shouldn’t be a surprise”- I guess I should call my representative comments- Just boycot tech commentsUsually nothing much actionable. Building the Ad/Surveillance/Privacy Invasion society? Very actionable, good pay, many mouths fed and FIRE accomplished by HN posters. There’s even at least one acronym for this life achievement.Shoutout to digital activists that are doing something. I’m but an armchair complainer on this front.[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48480840
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  alpineman
  Truly dystopian. The Pokémon Company should share the blame for licensing their brand in this way without proper safeguards to prevent the data being used for this, particularly given the background of the Niantic founders
• deafpolygon
  Complaints in this thread, yet no one will boycott Nintendo for doing this. Ultimately, they allowed this data to be collected and then sold.
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  ai_fry_ur_brain
  Niantics founder has CIA roots... None of this is surprising.https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/302386307352562
• tokai
  Sentiment here is blowing this waaay out of proportion. It's not new technology, and its not particularly scary or dystopian.
• pknerd
  "If something is free, you are the product."
• freakynit
  Watch Dogs: Legion
• tamimio
  You should assume any camera recording will turn into a model one way or another, if not for gnss denied navigation, it will be on facial recognition or such.
• saberience
  This is one of the most dystopian things I've heard in a long while.I mean, we have a lot of weird shit going down right now... like AI being used to automate art BEFORE it's being used to automate dangerous and menial jobs, but knowing that people are being killed with help from data generated by millions of kids and young adults playing a fun, cute videogame is just so freaking dark and weird.We are a very strange species and I don't have a great deal of hope for our future.
• bronlund
  Just wonderful.
• lapinovski
  everything sucks :(
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  self_awareness
  Insane.People literally traded military intelligence for Pokémon.
• trhway
  upon seeing the title i was only wondering - whose drones.
• keketi
  surprised pikachu face
• Ccecil
  Hate to say I called this years ago....It is a shameful use of tech.
• totetsu
  [dead]