‘Pokémon Go’ players have been unknowingly training delivery robots

https://www.popsci.com/technology/pokemon-go-delivery-robots-crowdsourcing/

30 Comments

  1. This is what’s nice about being a console gamer. TAS already exists. They can’t train anything based on my play except how to do it worse 

  2. TheDukeofArgyll on

    Man… remember when we could just use the internet and not have to be conscious of our data being stolen.

  3. Commodus_Wankus on

    Until they devise a way to finish my dick when I’m too drunk to continue whackin it, I’m not interested.

  4. ningendearukoto on

    All those Pokémon go players are going to be regretting it when their online orders are delivered faster and cheaper 

  5. i_love_land92 on

    There’s a game mode in Battlefield 6 where you delivery “intel drives” to drones that fly away. I joke with my friends that we’re actually just delivering packages for Amazon and this story just confirms my suspicion.

  6. I can’t believe the game that maps the world and location data is going to use and sell that data

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  7. SpaceChef3000 on

    Considering how many players complete scan field research tasks by just waving their phone back and forth at the ground wherever they happen to be I don’t have a lot of confidence in these delivery robots.

  8. Hot_Calendar_4959 on

    Incentivise short travels between point A and B, you can even crowd source most efficient pedestrian routes that algorithms can’t pathfind.

  9. >Niantic trained that VPS model on more than 30 billion images captured by Pokémon Go users, and claims it will help robots operate in areas where GPS falls short.

    Wait what? I played this back in the day and don’t recall ever taking pictures for this game.

  10. That wasn’t obvious when we all were walking around geo tagging points of interest?

  11. Life_Combination8625 on

    All they got from me was a lot of footage of my dog walking, peeing or pooping

  12. MothChasingFlame on

    …Which PokeGo player *didn’t* know? It’s been pretty obvious to all of us since day 1 that this is a data mining effort in an Ash Ketchum trenchcoat. 

  13. Wooden_Echidna1234 on

    Makes sense, Niantic was always focused on getting data over sales and clearly it was much more profitable.

  14. AFAIK Niantic Spatial was spun off of the part of the company that was not sold to Scopely, no? So do they have any hand in Pokémon Go’s data?

  15. “Unknowingly”?

    Getting users to give you craptons of walking route data was kinda openly the point. 

    Getting the users to *pay you* for the data they gave you was a pleasant side benefit for the studio. 

  16. Stopped playing when i realized that i’d have to spend $ to store a decent amount of pokemon.

    uninstalled it when the sau di company bought it