With Niantic deciding not to sell Ingress (AR game originally developed by Google) with the reason being how it helps them with data for their VPS system, it made me realise how it solidify the way I think about a lot of things operating at the world and the influences I've had before it.
Ingress is this thing that I happened to be a part of back when I wanted to add more Pokéstops to Pokémon Go, and ended up sticking with whilr actually ditching PoGo. The motivator of this is actually with how people from the opposing faction and I act, as well as my teammates who I've mostly never met because of me being some nerd who simply doesn't want to interact with people especially as years went by, and also the fact that I can contribute in *some* way to the game with the added bonus of an in game badge. There would be a lot I can say about people from both sides, but I simply do not think I should say much about them, besides my thoughts were all on the contribution part of it, so let's focus on that.
Niantic had this thing called Wayfarer (that they are selling) and the way it works is that you can judge if a "wayspot" (that is used for Niantic's other platforms, for instance they form Pokéstops for PoGo) meets a certain written list of requirements, and you can either rank them (old) or see if they meet the binary requirement(s) (new) to essentially mark if a wayspot's legit. You can also submit them (which was why there were PoGo players who wants to play ingress to get the access requirement as even though ingress as a game is confusing with no clear objective, it is easier to get the required level there for wayfarer access).
My relationship with Wayfarer is that I've always liked the idea of it, I also liked reviewing for a while, but the implementation is just not good and eventually it's as if they simply do not want people to contribute to the system seriously (or it could be how most people in it are simply, not at a sufficient quality) so eventually I built `auto-wayfarer` (source code availble btw) and see if I can use an LLM to do this for me so I can get my Onyx badge and be done with it and for some reason they liked it more when I used `gemini-1.0-pro` as opposed to `gemini-1.5-flash`, but that's about it.
There's another thing that's related to their VPS (Visual Positioning System) that I do in ingress for in game benefits, I'd say their quality system is satisfactory so that things are *functional*, if it works well it works really well, but if it doesn't there simply is no easy way to fix it. There are 2 parts (for the end user/"developer") to it, 1 is called scanning, which is basically you using your phone camera to shoot at a specific object as you receive justifiable looks from others, then the system would judge the quality of the scan (so if you scanned your finger they would treat it like garbage) and if it is good enough it would be counted as a "good" quality scan, and eventually once there is enough of these scans one can try and "activate" a wayspot, if it is activated, anyone (with a phone that's generally not cheap) can shoot at the exact same place that represents the wayspot, if it matches the 3D mesh it produces (and if it's not too dark) it will locate the user. For ingress specifically if the VPS quality is "good" you can do something called "overclocking" which once mastered gives the player a lot of items in a very efficient manner (with the potential cost of people asking if you are shooting at them).
So why am I talking about this? There have been lots of people who said they wouldn't contribute simply because they don't want to become a "free labour" of Niantic, which though understandable, I never agreed with it, because I do not think it matters if I'm doing this work for free. The culture I've been surrounded by generally favours taking the most while giving the least, I've thought about why this is for a very long time and the only "justification" I can give is how some people just think this selfishly most of the time. In many cases this can be justified by how you are just trying to decide which business benefits you the most which extends to how they benefit others the most, but with things like contributing to data there is no way that I geniunely understand why and how some would never do this out of integrity, yet they don't care when companies do the same thing to them with tracking and targeted advertisements.
Personally I think this is fine if this is an opt-in thing, and I also think it is generally a good idea that people (who know what they are doing) contribute to these platforms, proprietary or not. The reason is that I don't actually think being proprietary makes something immediately bad and a lot of the times people like to hate on some things *simply* because they are proprietary, when in most cases things being "open" does not make the thing itself "for the people" either. There are exceptions to when things are open, but I can make the same argument for things that are closed, and I think they can simply co-exist and mutually benefit each other this way instead of fighting over how a system being less open makes it less trustworthy or not while betrayals in the more open side of things has been happening and it will continue to happen (see Firefox, or how VS Code handles telementry, and a lot of decisions that makes people unhappy in the *nix space for profit over people).
This is part of the reason why I was actually a Google fanboy while I wasn't aware of their ethics on user data, the fact that me as a random person online can help with polishing the data on platforms like translate and maps makes it so that I'm actually contributing to something that actually benefits people in one way or another for real. This is also why I'm hooked with the idea of open source, the fact that anyone can publish anything so that their thing may help someone else in a way they can trust despite it just being some code from a possibly nobody is and has been fascinating to me.
Though there's also a clear line to draw between data I consented the entity that they can use, and data that I have not put any consent for others to use. The way I see it, with the way the Internet works, if there is a ToS, as long as the user understands the risks of posting personal data online, and the service isn't from a government entity which requires you to install the thing (I think it should never happen regardless of the government that you are), the service can and should use my data, not because I don't value my privacy (though to be honest I don't), but because the user has decided to trust this entity from the Internet, and by extension, the Internet in general, to be able to use their data. This is mostly ethics talk, but I think that if I have put my data on the Internet, if this isn't something that they should be protecting at all costs (passwords, IDs etc), because me as an user (and by extension anyone else) has decided to trust the entity, it is only fair if me as a user understands that they *can* have the lack of human decency and use my data however they want, if you want you can always use something like the GPL to protect against most of these, but as far as I'm concerned Internet privacy has never been a thing because of the way the Internet is designed and people being salty about their data being used in unethical ways is like complaining about how mean people who thinks differently exists in the real world.
I think it is also important to acknowledge that this means that I don't think there should ever be a power powerful enough to force people into using the Internet in ways they want people to, simply because despite everything at its core this should **always** be an opt-in and should **never** be a requirement, but whether or not this is feasible is another topic, especially for most people who seems to dislike the idea of thinking.
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