I was not aware of this used to open street maps at all. I thought it was based on Google Maps. Still.
If they used Google maps, Niantic would have to pay Google. That’s no Bueno. Why pay for content critical to your apps success when you could just freeload on volunteers work instead?
Pokemon Go brought more users to OSM, so there was definitely some mutual benefit going on.
Vandals, yes, but plenty of legit contributers, too.
I know this seems like Niantic is free-loading, but this is intentionally-allowed by the ODbL license and honestly, might be a good business decision even without considering the licensing fees. OSM is almost 20 years old and as a community led project, is probably more predictable and stable than a Google license which could change drastically from one contract to the next.
As a OSM contributor, I’m more than happy to see my work used this way, and as @QuadratureSurfer@lemmy.world pointed out, OSM has seen a lot of benefit too.
Don’t get any changes reviewed before , you know, really replacing map data ? I’m just curious. There are a lot of players worldwide, I can imagine the game going strong for another few years and OSM ending up choke full of areas that were pokemon’d and made unusable.
I’m a pretty junior contributor (I spent a couple years completing quests on StreetComplete and only have been adding new buildings, etc for a few weeks). I don’t know a ton about how the organization is run, so I can only talk from my experiences. I’ve been able to upload changes which will be live before they will be reviewed. I know there are reviewers who go through areas regularly, but they definitely don’t cover everywhere. I’m not sure if OSM has the ability to lockdown areas with frequent vandalism.
From what I can tell, changes are just uploaded immediately. I think If someone adds wrong data, another contributor can revert it.
when you could just freeload on volunteers work instead?
Part of – if not the primary point – of OSM is that people can use its database in their projects. That’s a feature, not a bug. They could have very readily restricted commercial use of the database and chose not to do so.
I would have been far less-willing to contribute if it weren’t a resource available to everyone.
Niantic is a Google spinoff, and the data they generated for Ingress was used for Google Maps. I’m surprised they don’t have a special deal with Google.
Google doesn’t own most of their map data - they license it off other companies that have spent decades and billions of dollars collecting map data from all around the world.
So even if Google gives a project a “special deal” it’s still not going to be free. Open Street Map, on the other hand, is totally free. And in some ways it’s better than Google Maps — because it has millions of people contributing to the map. No commercial mapping company can come close to the level of detail OSM has. Compare these two screenshots — the Google map has so much less detail it’s not even recognisable as the same place. Roads and major features are missing or drawn in the wrong place.
the Google map has so much less detail
Google maps also has bad data for many places. My home address is the wrong street name. Google maps says it’s “Drive”, when it’s “Court”. It’s been that way for 22 years apparently. Google is the only one that has it wrong. I’ve submitted 10 tickets to fix it, they keep denying the change.
Waze, Fixed it myself. OSM, did have it wrong about a year ago (before I moved in) was corrected when apparently a current OSM board member imported a cluster of addresses from the National Address Database.
Apple has it right. Bing maps has it right… Every other source has it right. Google maps just sucks.
What’s worse is that many companies use google’s dataset for address validation. Since my address doesn’t “exist” according to the omniscient google, I’m just screwed when I enter my address on those sites.
For anyone else that didn’t read the article (or can’t hear words in parentheses because they are too quiet):
According to a report from 404 Media, some of those players have been adding fake beaches to OpenStreetMap so they could have easier access to the beach biome in Pokémon Go (though the game Go initially used Google Maps data, it apparently switched to OpenStreetMap at some point in 2017).
Why does every article fail to mention that the ingame map only updates once every 3 years or so? And that this griefing is most likely done once per person, until they find out that the game isn’t updated? (Because it’s not sensational)
That doesn’t change the fact that it causes problems for openstreetmap
It does not. But it means they are trying to limit the damage caused by griefers, and moreso than just displaying a popup message with “please don’t grief openstreetmaps” or something. Imagine how bad it would be if changes to openstreetmaps actually were immediately imported into the game…
It blows my mind people still play this game. It was great, in 2017.
Also doubt this game will be the only source of bad data. We need better safe guards and checks so that some person can’t just delete France.
Now hold on a moment, I think we need to at least discuss this whole removing France thing further…
It would be easy to accidentally wipe some other country instead of France. That’s why we need to verify data
I can now see the importance of safeguards!
Yeah we need backup systems that automatically wipe out France
It’s worth pointing out that once Pokémon Go players found out about OSM, we saw a massive increase in new users as well as those contributing to OSM so that the maps would better reflect the areas they played in.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/334378297_How_an_augmented_reality_game_Pokemon_GO_affected_volunteer_contributions_to_OpenStreetMap
Unfortunately there are always a few that will try to game any system. In this case they’re essentially vandalizing OSM for their own selfish reasons.
