Have you seen that Mapillary is now Facebook-owned: Mapillary Joins Facebook on the Journey of Improving Maps Everywhere - The Mapillary Blog ?
What do you think about this?
3 Likes
You first.
In my opinion a lot of things that are wrong and go wrong on the web are somehow connected to Facebook and it saddens me that they ingest a company that was doing something connected to Openness.
I fear that this will eventually lead to another silo where work/images from the community which is aiming to enhance specifically OpenStreetMap are kept for creating value/money for a behemoth and will be less free to access for free things.
For me specifically this will greatly curb my enthusiasm towards Mapillary, and I probably wonât upload another +100k images (for which Iâm still awaiting my package BTW), talk about it with my geeky friends and write blog posts about it.
12 Likes
Oh, and I havenât seen that you posted this a while before me: Page not found
I append my thread here now =
âWhat are you doingâ ?
âI am taking pictures for Facebook but your face will be blurred.â
I am not an accountant. But behind all the beautiful words, what has happened ?
I have always been afraid of the day that the plug would be pulled out of the socket, but this is better.
I still have thoughts but it is a bit late in the evening now, if you know what I mean.
And I am curious about other opinions.
Body is too similar to what your recently posted, just some trouble with the forum watchdog.
2 Likes
I donât like Facebook and what they do, but they probably cannot mine WhatsApp conversations, since these are end-to-end encrypted. The metadata, e.g. who is in coversation with whom is another story.
But this whole part of the story is another story.
1 Like
Hello,
For my side, I will stop any contribution since I donât want to have any FB related activityâŚ
9 Likes
I just get the information about the mapillary sellout from a local OpenStreetMap mailinglist - WTF
I donât want to donate my spare time as a volunteer to companies like Facebook. Thats very sad!
9 Likes
Its also unclear what it exactly means. The blog did not give sufficient information. How exactly are ḿy contributions used by Facebook? What are the mapping needs for them?
Is it true that Facebook has now access to rough mapillary image data (licence plates , faces), and how will they use / exploit it? That looks not good.
3 Likes
For me, this is reason to stop Mapillary immediately and I will delete all my photos. Even if this has to be done manually, it is a huge task.
Facebook / Mapillary will have nice talk about it in the beginning, but we know better. Anything that FB says they wonât do, they do after a while.
For me, this feels like a dagger in the back, to the participants of this - once so nice - project.
4 Likes
My initial reaction was pretty much this:
After all, isnât it the goal of all startups to sell out to the highest bidder? Anyone remember Polar Rose? And there arenât so many buyers out there. Besides Facebook, there are Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Apple and thatâs pretty much it in the big league. If you want to cash in, these are the choices. All great and morally unambigous, arenât they?
I still use Github after Microsoft takeover, Waze after Google takeover and probably lot of other stuff I am not even aware that have changed ownership. Not to mention all their services directly.
Of course, my employer has used Mapillary data for reducing cost and generating revenue so even my personal contributions are not exactly volunteering. So I have somewhat different standing point than true volunteers.
2 Likes
Should it be possible for the team to delete all my images with
- blurred areas representing a human, and:
- blurred areas representing license plates ?
In that case maybe 25% of my uploads will be deleted but at least I will prevent facebook using that data for possible privacy infringement which was never my intention by joining Mapillary.
1 Like
Was it Jan Erikâs decision ? Or did the capital venture fund decide ? And what about the partners ?
1 Like
Hi, all.
I was surprised by this move. My first thought was to leave Mapillary immediately; then I thought that Facebook (FB) might bring some great innovation to the app; then I thought about uploaders being used to âspyâ for FB.
Conclusion:
Iâm going to wait to see how this develops, but I already have OpenStreetCam (OSC) installed, and am ready to switch over. Technically, OSC isnât perfect, but neither is the Mapillary app.
Iâd like to have the option to automatically transfer all of my Mapillary images to another source.
Interesting timesâŚ
Chris
chris_debian
2E0FRU
2 Likes
I will not support Mapillary with any images and gpx tracks furthermore, because of the Facebook deal.
This month Iâve donated 52.4 K pictures, taken by bicycle on first time mapillared roads.
Bye bye
Well done! Especially on unmapped roads.
Chris
I feel a better outcome could have been reached by alternative solutions short of full ownership transfer, e.g. a foundation sponsord by FB and possibly others with a clear mandate to manage the infrastructure and grant access for both commercial and non-commercial use. FB would still have had access to the data, but we as contributors wouldnât be made to feel silly volunteering for Facebook Inc., one of the richest tech companies on this planet and perhaps the one with the worst reputation (bad reputation that is quite unrelated to its engagement with OSM, publication of nicely licensed geo datasets, etc.)
Even in this alternative scenario (itâs not too late, lovely folks at Mapillary and now FB, think it through!), the contents contributed by volunteers would still be available to FB and to all others, but we would be in the position to say âoh, weâre mapping the planet for the benefit of allâ.
I know that in theory this is true even under the FB deal as briefly described in that post, but it doesnât feel the same⌠and feelings do matter, if you want people to volunteer their time and resources. This is exceptionally problematic due to the (deservedly) bad reputation that FB has, in particular among those who feel unconfortable with concentration of power in the hands of few big tech companies⌠which I suppose must be part of the reason why many of us contribute to Mapillary, otherwise weâd probably be taking pics for Google Street View, if at all.
Openly licensed street-level imagery is important. Mapillary and FB can still get this right. But more transparency in this phase, clear legally binding long-term commitments, and keeping as much distance as possible from FB even while remaining under that umbrella (and ideally, under a separate umbrella), should be part of it.
From that blog post it doesnât seem that Mapillaryâs management understands just how difficult it feels for Mapillary contributors to say: âWeâre volunteering our free time and resources taking geolocated pics for Facebook Inc.â. The new licensing seems right, and indeed better than the previous, so this characterisation wouldnât be quite correct, but thatâs still how it feels.
I hope they get this right and wonât let go to waste the incredible amount of goodwill that has been demonstrated by Mapillary contributors in recent years.
3 Likes
Iâm not worried on the privacy of the people in the photos nor for the privacy of the uploader, those things are simply not valuable for Facebook. Whatâs the point of Facebook knowing that person x was at place y seven years ago? They are only interested in up to date-information. And the number of Mapillary users is simply too small to be any valuable.
The only thing I worry is quality of the images. Facebook is known for itâs heavy compressing of images, both on Facebook itself and WhatsApp. I hope they keep the images on Mapillary at their best quality, even if it sucks a lot of server storage (come on, youâre Facebook, if you canât manage it nobody can)?
I will also leave. Facebook has done enough to break any trust I had like a decade ago and I refuse to use their services (as good as possible, at least).
If anyone knows a (at least somewhat) quick and easy way to download my pictures including geotags please tell me. Ideally I want to move all my stuff over to OSC so the imagery is not lost.
Goodbye Mapillary, I understand your decision and am thankful for every mapper it helped, as well as the places Iâve discovered for the sake of new imagery, however I will not continue to use it if itâs owned by FB.
1 Like
Donât know if itâs possible but even if it is, youâll have a lot false positives. Go into the blur editor and youâll see that a lot of tiny false positives are recognized for almost every picture. You donât notice that when viewing the pictures so it doesnât matter but in this case it will cause many pictures to be deleted that shouldnât. So youâll have a much higher quote than 25% even if youâre taking pictures in empty areas.