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I'm sure the CIA already has access. [1] People were raising privacy concerns years ago. [2] [1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/953621/the-cia-nsa-and-po

by janice1999 2y ago

I'm sure the CIA already has access. [1] People were raising privacy concerns years ago. [2] [1] https://www.networkworld.com/article/953621/the-cia-nsa-and-pokmon-go.html https://www.networkworld.com/article/953621/the-cia-nsa-and-... [2] https://kotaku.com/the-creators-of-pokemon-go-mapped-the-world-now-theyre-1838974714 https://kotaku.com/the-creators-of-pokemon-go-mapped-the-wor...

andrewmcwatters 2y ago
[flagged]
- Onavo 2y ago
  More like Celesteela, after all, you need jet fuel to melt steel beams.
dgfitz 2y ago
Google maps has more data than PGO could ever hope to have.
- esafak 2y ago
  But you only use Maps when you need directions.
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    I don’t think this is sarcasm. Until pretty recently, phone telemetry data was a free-for-all, and if you’re, say, in legal trouble, a map of the location of your phone over the past… however long you’ve had your phone is immediately available.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
astrange 2y ago
People have a lot of strange beliefs about the CIA. Why would they even care about this?
- tiahura 2y ago
  Upload a picture of a bad guy in an office lobby to pokegpt and ask it where he is.
  - vasco 2y ago
    You can do that for free by sending the picture to a geoguessr streamer on twitch.
    - astrange 2y ago
      Or Google Lens. Regardless this isn't the CIA, it's the NGIA.
- blueflow 2y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel is a major investor into Niantic.
BirAdam 2y ago
Hanke’s actually got awards from CIA for his work at In-Q-Tel investing in Keyhole/Niantic, so yeah, safe to assume that the agency invested specifically to have players collect data. Considering many Pokémon were on or near military bases around the world… not hard to assume what CIA’s real goal was. https://futurism.com/the-byte/pokemon-go-trespassers-military-bases https://futurism.com/the-byte/pokemon-go-trespassers-militar...
smcin 2y ago
I was wondering about the privacy implications: given a photo, the LGM could decode it to not just positioning, but also time-of-day and season (and maybe even year, or specific unique dates e.g. concerts, group activities). Colors, amount of daylight(/nightlight), weather/precipitation/heat haze, flowers and foliage, traffic patterns, how people are dressed, other human features (e.g. signage and/or decorations for Easter/Halloween/Christmas/other events/etc.) (as the press release says: "In order to solve positioning well, the LGM has to encode rich geometrical, appearance and cultural information into scene-level features"... but then it adds "And, as noted, beyond gaming LGMs will have widespread applications, including spatial planning and design, logistics, audience engagement, and remote collaboration.") So would they predict from a trajectory (multiple photos + inferred timeline) whether you kept playing/ stopped/ went to buy refreshments? As written it doesn't say the LGM will explicitly encode any player-specific information, but I guess it could be deanonymized (esp. infer who visited sparsely-visited locations). (Yes obviously Niantic and data brokers already have much more detailed location/time/other data on individual user behavior, that's a given.)
- KaiserPro 2y ago
  > Colors, amount of daylight(/nightlight), weather/precipitation/heat haze, flowers and foliage, traffic patterns, how people are dressed, other human features (e.g. signage and/or decorations for Easter/Halloween/Christmas/other events/etc.) I mean, in theory it could. But in practice it'll just output lat, lon and a quaternion. Its going to be hard enough to get the model to behave well enough to localize reliably, let alone do all the other things. The dataset, yes, that'll contain all those things. but the model won't.
  - smcin 2y ago
    You don't know for sure the model won't contain non-location data, like I noted the additional blurb vaguely said: "And, as noted, beyond gaming LGMs will have widespread applications, including spatial planning and design, logistics, audience engagement, and remote collaboration."
    - 2y ago

andrewmcwatters 2y ago

[flagged]

Onavo 2y ago
More like Celesteela, after all, you need jet fuel to melt steel beams.

dgfitz 2y ago

Google maps has more data than PGO could ever hope to have.

esafak 2y ago
But you only use Maps when you need directions.
- dgfitz 2y ago
  I don’t think this is sarcasm. Until pretty recently, phone telemetry data was a free-for-all, and if you’re, say, in legal trouble, a map of the location of your phone over the past… however long you’ve had your phone is immediately available.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

astrange 2y ago

People have a lot of strange beliefs about the CIA. Why would they even care about this?

tiahura 2y ago
Upload a picture of a bad guy in an office lobby to pokegpt and ask it where he is.
- vasco 2y ago
  You can do that for free by sending the picture to a geoguessr streamer on twitch.
  - astrange 2y ago
    Or Google Lens. Regardless this isn't the CIA, it's the NGIA.
blueflow 2y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-Q-Tel is a major investor into Niantic.

BirAdam 2y ago

Hanke’s actually got awards from CIA for his work at In-Q-Tel investing in Keyhole/Niantic, so yeah, safe to assume that the agency invested specifically to have players collect data. Considering many Pokémon were on or near military bases around the world… not hard to assume what CIA’s real goal was. https://futurism.com/the-byte/pokemon-go-trespassers-military-bases https://futurism.com/the-byte/pokemon-go-trespassers-militar...

smcin 2y ago

I was wondering about the privacy implications: given a photo, the LGM could decode it to not just positioning, but also time-of-day and season (and maybe even year, or specific unique dates e.g. concerts, group activities). Colors, amount of daylight(/nightlight), weather/precipitation/heat haze, flowers and foliage, traffic patterns, how people are dressed, other human features (e.g. signage and/or decorations for Easter/Halloween/Christmas/other events/etc.) (as the press release says: "In order to solve positioning well, the LGM has to encode rich geometrical, appearance and cultural information into scene-level features"... but then it adds "And, as noted, beyond gaming LGMs will have widespread applications, including spatial planning and design, logistics, audience engagement, and remote collaboration.") So would they predict from a trajectory (multiple photos + inferred timeline) whether you kept playing/ stopped/ went to buy refreshments? As written it doesn't say the LGM will explicitly encode any player-specific information, but I guess it could be deanonymized (esp. infer who visited sparsely-visited locations). (Yes obviously Niantic and data brokers already have much more detailed location/time/other data on individual user behavior, that's a given.)

KaiserPro 2y ago
> Colors, amount of daylight(/nightlight), weather/precipitation/heat haze, flowers and foliage, traffic patterns, how people are dressed, other human features (e.g. signage and/or decorations for Easter/Halloween/Christmas/other events/etc.) I mean, in theory it could. But in practice it'll just output lat, lon and a quaternion. Its going to be hard enough to get the model to behave well enough to localize reliably, let alone do all the other things. The dataset, yes, that'll contain all those things. but the model won't.
- smcin 2y ago
  You don't know for sure the model won't contain non-location data, like I noted the additional blurb vaguely said: "And, as noted, beyond gaming LGMs will have widespread applications, including spatial planning and design, logistics, audience engagement, and remote collaboration."
  - 2y ago