I thought this was an interesting read today as there was a lot of news about the company Niantic and how they recently started to focus more in providing AI companies with things like their data as it would enable robots to potentially see where they’re going with great detail and the way they generated this data was from its games. For example, game like Pokémon Go. It’s basically augmented reality where players are actually walking out in real life. What players would do is they would submit these points of interest. It could be a landmark somewhere famous and with that in the game they would actually add certain features that allow you to interact with those areas.
As you can imagine, there was millions of people that are playing things like Pokémon Go and other games which generate this data for them. They’re basically in a sense reusing this data and selling it to companies. As I was reading, there was one company that uses robots to deliver pizza and this data was a lot more effective than just relying on things like GPS on a map. Why this was generating a lot of controversy online is when you think about it the company Niantic didn’t have for example their own employees spending millions of dollars to try to map everything out. Kind of like what Google did with their Google maps car mapping. For example, they literally drove around areas trying to map a whole city. They’re actually using their players to do this if you think about it. And not only are they getting it for free, but in many cases players are paying the company for the privilege to do this.
So imagine being a company where you double dip there. Not only do you get to charge people money for people to play your game, but at the same time you’re in a sense reusing the data that they give you to make even more money. So it kind of makes you wonder nowadays where if you ever see any type of app or let’s just say program in general and they advertise it as free to use you have to be wondering why is it free? Are they using your data in these ways? I suppose it’s really smart from a business perspective, as again, you’re kind of getting the benefits of both areas. Is it an ethics issue? Maybe? But I guess ultimately it’s just as they say where it comes down to business. No wonder why they sold their games division huh with things like Pokémon Go if this is the new strategy in terms of making money.