I don’t know, but feel free to send me an offer.

Well, there is when you no longer deserve credit for the work and your boss, should you be fortunate enough to even have a job, just expects you to do more work. The satisfaction will evaporate pretty quickly.

To maintain that take, wouldn't you need to offer a plausible way that Niantic managed to train their Visual Positioning System using that data if the data was all bad?

I guess we don't know the terms of the deal, as far as how much they paid? So maybe they didn't pay much, so whatever data they could extract was ok for the cost.

The other point from article. I took this as experimental, so maybe we'll find out later that they really couldn't get much usable data.

> contracts

Are you assuming that the foundation for those, Rule of Law, is alive & healthy in an autocracy?

For the US, thus far, we keep discovering that we have yet to hit bottom — so probably more.

The vast majority of users on every forum in Internet history, from Usenet to slashdot to Twitter and beyond, have always been lurkers: people who almost exclusively read. They are essential to the vitality of the forums but they are invisible, proverbial dark matter. They do not deserve to be treated as less than. But I don’t exactly want to stop X from shooting themselves in the foot for the umteenth time.

That's a great point. I guess the key thing to determine is if a person is even reading content, or lurking so to speak.

I don't like this stuff. I suppose you can anonymize this data easily, but it inevitably requires a degree of spying on users. I know tracking usage like this wouldn't be anywhere near the top of the list in terms of creepy egregious stuff these platforms do, but I don't like the idea of it. Everything has become so invasive.

Aren't shifts in the Overton Window are qualitatively different from attempts to avoid the wrath of an organized crime syndicate in power?

Very fun. I wonder, though: can one ever do “clean room” anything using these Plagiarism Laundering machines?

Contract law will certainly be a casualty once Rule of Law has completely been broken. I don’t understand why the business sector isn’t pushing back more. Surely they must all know that the legal legal context itself, within which they all operate, is at mortal risk and that Business as Usual will vanish once autocratic capture is complete.

They still think they can bribe their way out