Mapillary joins Facebook

After all, isn’t it the goal of all startups to sell out to the highest bidder?

Yes, but price is not the only thing to consider. I would argue that trust is the most important currency in data services.

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.

It is okay for Mapillary to make a living and customers to reduce costs. Nobody disputes that. And, it also does not matter if the data collected comes from payed contributions or free volunteer donations. The problem is that data collectors have obligations and they have to respect third party rights, and especially of those people who are not even aware that data has been collected about them without their consent, like faces and license plates. So, selling out to a company which has built their entire business model solely on spying on their customers and non-customers (see shadow profiles) is the problem.

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Was it Jan Erik’s decision ? Or did the capital venture fund decide ? And what about the partners ?

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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 ‘spy’ for FB.

Conclusion:

I’m going to wait to see how this develops, but I already have OpenStreetCam (OSC) installed, and am ready to switch over. Technically, OSC isn’t perfect, but neither is the Mapillary app.

https://openstreetcam.org/

I’d like to have the option to automatically transfer all of my Mapillary images to another source.

Interesting times…

Chris
chris_debian
2E0FRU

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I will not support Mapillary with any images and gpx tracks furthermore, because of the Facebook deal.
This month I’ve 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 wouldn’t 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 (it’s 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 “oh, we’re mapping the planet for the benefit of all”.

I know that in theory this is true even under the FB deal as briefly described in that post, but it doesn’t 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 we’d 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 doesn’t seem that Mapillary’s management understands just how difficult it feels for Mapillary contributors to say: “We’re volunteering our free time and resources taking geolocated pics for Facebook Inc.”. The new licensing seems right, and indeed better than the previous, so this characterisation wouldn’t be quite correct, but that’s still how it feels.

I hope they get this right and won’t let go to waste the incredible amount of goodwill that has been demonstrated by Mapillary contributors in recent years.

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I’m 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. What’s 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 it’s 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, you’re Facebook, if you can’t 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 I’ve discovered for the sake of new imagery, however I will not continue to use it if it’s owned by FB.

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Don’t know if it’s possible but even if it is, you’ll have a lot false positives. Go into the blur editor and you’ll see that a lot of tiny false positives are recognized for almost every picture. You don’t notice that when viewing the pictures so it doesn’t matter but in this case it will cause many pictures to be deleted that shouldn’t. So you’ll have a much higher quote than 25% even if you’re taking pictures in empty areas.

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This looks brilliant! Before downloading the imagery, will the script tell you the size of the download, so you know you won’t run out of disk space?

Thanks,

Chris

Mmmm, given I have 2 million images I might need to get a few extra terrabytes of disc space!

the script does not specify the size of the files. I calculate about 3 TB for 1,000,000 images.

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I am pretty sure we have all the rights to do that under GDPR – let’s try to request to provide all our personal data and content. If I read the law right, Mapillary will have 30 days to do that. Moreover, under the very same GDPR we can request to remove all data uploaded by us, too…

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Not a lawyer, but GDPR covers personally identifiable data. Contributions to a crowdsourced dataset are governed by an agreement, usually licensing.
Quoting Terms of Use :

You and each Mapillary User hereby grant to us the perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid-up, sub-licensable, non-exclusive right and license to use, reproduce, modify, create derivative works of, perform, display and distribute without restriction (including via any medium) Content, in whole or in part, for commercial and non-commercial purposes, including (a) for purposes of providing, developing, improving, making available (including via public search engines), promoting and marketing the Mapillary Solution and (b) making available Mapillary User Content under the Outbound Terms.

I somehow view possible deletion of contributed content similar to somebody deciding to delete their contributions to OSM. Other users based their contributions on what was in there already (like not surveying - or photographing - a particular area). Ability to delete contributions at will harms other contributors.
Granted, OSM and Mapillary are significantly different, given the highly open and decentralised nature of OSM, contrasted with very centralised nature of Mapillary.

I can sympathise a lot with people having concerns, and I hope Mapillary team can work on legal issues, commitment to openness and communication to address concerns in a diplomatic way instead of a legal hammer (as in saying “you licensed it, too bad”).

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I agree with @Richlv, I strongly doubt you can demand Facebook deletes the pictures you uploaded, as they are your contributions under their TOS, not your personal data.

Deleting your photos through the site or a tool, will only delete them from the Mapillary website, not from any backup and Facebook will still own them. This actually makes things easier for Facebook, since Facebook has less hosting costs with your photos gone, and worse for other users, since they can’t use your contributions anymore.

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I also agree with @Richlv: I’ve been using a lot of Mapillary images for my OSM editing, of course not only my photos, but from lots of other people. It would be a shame if these photos are all gone because everyone is deleting theirs.
As I’ve written before, I’ll probably just stop contributing more images, but am happy to use the ‘old’ ones…

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Exactl!
The problem I also see is that there is no other platform, since OpenStreetCam in particular seems to have gone the way of the Dodo since it was transferred to Grab.

The problem with this approach is that it does not put any pressure on Mapillary nor on Facebook. Unless people start massively pulling out their imagery from Mapillary nothing is going to happen. Facebook has already won, without even a fight.

It is inevitable, sooner or later Facebook will do use the imagery on Mapillary to spy on people. Perhaps in a more sophisticated way than before but they will still do it. Sure, they will keep quiet for the first couple of weeks but eventually they will do their questionable stuff. You have to remember that this is their business model. Nobody pays millions or perhaps even billions for something like Mapillary just out of pure altruistic reasons. You have to understand that Facebook did not acquire Mapillary for the marketing slogan to “Map the World for All for FREE!”. They did it for two hardcore business reasons. First, to buy into Mapillary’s machine learning technology. Second, to create new markets, to have access to more so called customers, who are nothing more than just prey for Facebook to vulture on. It is the same reason why Facebook contributes to OpenStreetMap; create new markets in order to lure in more oblivious fresh meat in previously unmapped and underdeveloped (e.g. without internet access yet) parts of the world with supposedly free services. Because, you know, since it is free it cannot be bad for you, nor your friends, right? :wink: Usually, this is the strategy of a drug dealer.

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@jesolem Imho selling out Mapillary to Facebook without consulting or even considering the community is just a kick in the gut plus a slap in the face of all the contributors who often worked hard and sometimes even invested money to capture imagery. You have grown big on the back of contributors (payed or non-payed) and you did not even care to listen to them what they might think of any particular takeover. So far, you have done a great job leading Mapillary and I want to give you the benefit of the doubt that the venture capitalists just wanted to cash-in now. I just wish things would have had a better outcome than Facebook. :disappointed:

As for the imagery, @peter said here that images are indeed deleted and not just hidden, if you do it yourself:
https://github.com/mapillary/mapillary_issues/issues/1502#issuecomment-183989362
So, my deleted sequences are slowly disappearing too.