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‘Pokémon Go’ players have been unknowingly training delivery robots (www.popsci.com)
submitted 5 months ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 121 points 5 months ago* (6 children)

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.

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  • [–] 88 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 6 points 5 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 34 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Pokémon Go already has multiple revenue streams, including direct in-app purchases.

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  • [–] 13 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah, but many players don’t pay, especially the huge player bases of children. They can subsidise that by selling your data.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    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.

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  • [–] 12 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    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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  • [–] 7 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    I'm a data engineer, ofc I know that. But you were excusing it as if their service has costs. That's bs, because their reported earnings that done without whatever profit they are going to gain from this harvest of train data already were very profitable.

    That's why I said you were in the wrong. Not because you expected them to sell everything they could, so did I, but because you justified that behaviour from the free to play model. That model exists in plenty games that are extremely successful without harvesting things beyond metadata.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago* (1 child)

    I wasn’t justifying it. Perhaps that came across the wrong way.

    They’re selling shit they never asked their users for and that’s bullshit, and should be illegal. Especially with children’s data.

    My point was they’re doing it.

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  • [–] 11 points 5 months ago

    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.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    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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  • [–] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

    Is the fediverse free?

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  • [–] 12 points 5 months ago (1 child)

    While the admins and donations make it free, I guarantee there's at least a few corporations or government organizations out there scraping the fediverse to gather data. So even though the people hosting it might not have any bad intentions, an open platform like this will still feed the data hungry machine.

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