Crowdsource by Google

https://crowdsource.google.com/about/

by YPPH • 4 years ago

140 120 4 years ago

crowdsource.google.com

dqpb• 4 years ago

Find Your Passion: Spotting food or animals in photos…
Get Recognized: earn cool badges, level up on the leaderboards…

unboxingelf• 4 years ago

You truly are the product.

Don’t feed the FAANG.

trapped3• 4 years ago

None of the FAANG companies are cartel or forcing any users to use their products at gun point.

Don't like their products then don't use it. Use alternative.

They built one of the best products hence most of the world is using it.

popcorncowboy• 4 years ago

This has gotta be trolling, but in case not.

Your comments are demonstrably disingenuous. You can't really opt-out. Employers, friends, family, partners, colleagues, peers, etc all rely on you relying on the FAANG/MAAMA networks and network-effect one way or another whether we want to or not. These companies provide what have become public utility services that large parts of society now depends upon.

"Best products"? (this was the troll right? ;) More like "only products", with positions that were achieved in no small part through anti-competitive, anti-consumer behaviours that have run almost unchecked for the better part of two decades.

So what alternative are you talking about? Opting out? That's only an option in the same way that you can theoretically "opt out of society" and go and live in a cave for a year or two before you die of malnutrition/illness/etc.

It's a capitulation to the embedded powers-that-be to imply this theoretical qualifies as practical alternative.

rejn• 4 years ago

Man, you are all over this defending the behemoths. Can I see your GOGL tattoo??

usr11062• 4 years ago

Not true. In many European cities you cannot rent a bike without being a customer of either Apple or being the product of Google.

Even buying public transport tickets gets hard without the app, which of course is not on F-Droid. Often you pay more on other channels.

mikro2nd• 4 years ago

Au contraire! DO feed the GRAFT - misinformation, noise, wrong answers only.

PS. The 1960's called and wanted their slogan back: "Fight the computer, fold your punch-cards."

strix_varius• 4 years ago

Is this essentially mechanical Turk, but without paying the laborers?

BbzzbB• 4 years ago

Seems like, with a better name tho.

But you get fun out of it! And you make a difference (in Alphabet's bottom line).

karmakaze• 4 years ago

..or "Crowdsource for Google"

mateo1• 4 years ago

Not really, you can't get child labor on MTurk (officially). But hey, you get badges, and you help the community by providing them training data they'll lock up in a server and use to monopolize more sectors of the economy. Everyone wins when google can do better sentiment analysis on your non-english emails.

userbinator2• 4 years ago

Because calling it "free labour" just wouldn't attract quite as many people...

Perhaps ~2 decades ago I would've been a bit more optimistic, but now that I'm aware of the authoritarian dystopia which Google and the rest of Big Tech are trying to drive society towards, I feel obliged to point out that helping it achieve that goal is a really bad idea.

winternett• 4 years ago

Free labor is all that is being pedaled in most of these projects... It really worries me about our future as a planet.

It's crazy how many people jump on doing surveys for free , and even in creating content for social platforms daily for free, because it's promoted by billion dollar profit companies that could easily hire and pay people while still making good profit.

The free labor economy is insanely out of control now, and accurate truths about the exploitation and data mining never will be discussed because these companies can easily suppress and downvote them. I don't do any surveys, haven't since before the Cambridge Analytica story.

abecedarian007• 4 years ago

*peddled

totetsu• 4 years ago

I gave away quite a bit of free labor to Google and niantic as they were launching ingress. If I had known that pokemon go would eventually be a thing, I might have thought a bit more about the power I had to shape where people would be walking every day for the next 10 years.

gerash• 4 years ago

I don't know what you are ranting about but the term "crowdsourcing" is exactly what this tool is created to do. Don't use it if you don't want to.

LittleShaman• 4 years ago

It's still funny a company awash in money wouldn't just hire people to do this.

And I'm quite sure people criticizing this won't be using it :)

bambax• 4 years ago

It could still be called "crowdsourcing" if it were compensated.

nine_k• 4 years ago

Now let's imagine it's fun enough so that people don't see it as free labor, but see it as genuine entertainment, like, say, Wordle.

How would they weed out bad-faith players who would try to teach the AI bad ideas, just for, well, fun of it?

I don't believe they might fail to anticipate that; I want to understand their approach.

alexjurkiewicz• 4 years ago

If you ask enough people the same question, it's easy to identify and drop outlier answers.

userbinator2• 4 years ago

That depends how political the question is.

scarface742• 4 years ago

So this helps improve Google’s proprietary products. But they aren’t willing to open source the data set?

nr2x• 4 years ago

I’m sure they’d generate more, and better, data if they committed to open source.

skybrian• 4 years ago

According to this page, they have already open sourced some datasets: https://crowdsource.google.com/about/open-source/

scarface742• 4 years ago

But they say nothing about it in the linked announcement.

Help Google create AI that understands your language and culture. Make your favorite apps and services even more useful and delightful for your community.

jackblemming• 4 years ago

Does anyone else hate what corporations have done to the word "delightful"? All the corporate art is so homogeneous too.

Also a trillion dollar plus market cap company trying to get free labor? Seriously?

trapped3• 4 years ago

It's giving free services. What about that? And, not just this one company many other trillion $$ market caps give free and paid services and also welcome free feedback.

When you comment on Yelp, Google Maps review, YouTube it's same.

rwalle2• 4 years ago

"free services"

(...subsidized by the huge amount of ads inserted everywhere)

celdon252• 4 years ago

Yes, it was those evil “boomer” companies that charged us money and gave us poor UX. Google saved us from that, praise Google.

I call this “digital tunnel vision”.

SkyMarshal• 4 years ago

Does anyone else hate what corporations have done to the word "delightful"?

Yes, and also to the word "exciting", the most overused word in the history of all human language.

drekipus• 4 years ago

This is kinda funny.

"Connect with others around the world"

The only connecting I'd want to do is with Chinese people to practise my Chinese. Inwhich my horribly broken Chinese would be a detriment to the algorithm.

jeswin• 4 years ago

Scammy how they're spinning it with language used by non-profits/charity: "Learn why your help matters".

arc-in-space• 4 years ago

Wow, did they intentionally try to make the most loathsome thing possible?

needle0• 4 years ago

So if Google services behave in a tone-deaf way regarding the culture and languages of non-western countries, now it's the fault of us the foreigners for not contributing enough to the AI?

j_barbossa2• 4 years ago

Crowdsource by Google aka "Help a billion dollar company to create datasets for free"

mhh__• 4 years ago

Make that a trillion

visarga2• 4 years ago

We are already providing search clicks and video likes as indicators of content quality. They train AIs on our preferences.

krono• 4 years ago

It's not working so well though, in my experience anyway

samatman• 4 years ago

Rare sighting of the long scale in the (English speaking) wild!

learndeeply2• 4 years ago

I was expecting to be pessimistic, but Google actually releases the datasets under a permissive license (CC-By 4.0). Awesome!

https://research.google/tools/datasets/open-images-extended-...

https://github.com/google-research-datasets/hiertext

j_barbossa2• 4 years ago

That blog post doesn't state that _all_ collected data through Crowdsource will get published.

bastawhiz• 4 years ago

Do you really want raw, unmoderated user generated content?

toomuchtodo• 4 years ago

Would this be compatible with importing into OpenStreetMap and similar open data projects?

habi2• 4 years ago

OpenStreetMap does not host images, other projects (close to OSM) do.

commoner2• 4 years ago

It's nice that Google is releasing something, but the 3 datasets (https://crowdsource.google.com/about/open-source/) only cover only a fraction of the Crowdsource tasks:

  Food compare: Compare the characteristics of two food images.
  Response rating: Evaluate the natural-ness of a bot response.
  Audio donation: Record your voice to improve speech technology.
  Food facts: Tell us if a food dish has particular characteristics.
  Food labeller: Tell us what food an image contains.
  Semantic similarity: Judge whether two phrases have the same meaning.
  Chart understanding: Judge whether charts are understandable and trustworthy.
  Glide type: Glide your fingers on the keyboard to type the text that you see.
  Audio validation: Listen to a short audio clip and determine if the pronunciation sounds natural in your language.
  Image label verification: Tell us if images are tagged correctly.
  Image capture: Collect and share photos of your part of the world.
  Translation: Translate phrases and words into different languages.
  Translation validation: Select which phrases are translated correctly.
  Handwriting recognition: Look at handwriting and type the text that you see.
  Sentiment evaluation: Decide if a sentence in your language is positive, negative or neutral.
  Smart camera (Android Lollipop 5.0+ required): Point at an object and see if the camera can guess what it is.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

Even in those 3 datasets, Google does not disclose the proportion/percentage of the crowdsourced contributions that are released publicly. I would not contribute to Crowdsource with the expectation that my contributions would help build a freely licensed dataset.

fxtentacle2• 4 years ago

"Google shares some Crowdsource data via open-sourcing"

Looks like the releases will only be partial. This kind of data should be collected bu a nonprofit for the benefit of everyone.

prox• 4 years ago

Also, what the crowd gets is “cool badges”

Who even comes up with these things?

nurettin• 4 years ago

I was expecting to be pessimistic, and I am, because I thought that datasets that actually matter probably won't be released and there is no guarantee that this trend will continue. Please don't trust the giant.

natly3• 4 years ago

Yeah, most of the 'Google Research Datasets' github account has super boring datasets. There's no way they'll help out with the actually interesting datasets (this is just PR).

natly3• 4 years ago

Btw what do those 'data cards' actually do? Can you get sued for going against it? Does it conflict with the permissive license or does that take precedence?

learndeeply2• 4 years ago

It's a strange ML term to describe the data's metadata.

bprasanna4• 4 years ago

They should avoid using the word community, if side product of these contributions are going to empower their sales. I had been contributing to Google Maps for more than 8 years now, but in return all i get is stars and maximum an invite to a meetup. But, when i saw the other side of Google Maps with respect to consuming it through API usage point of view, the prices are not affordable in long term. Also, there is a clear monopolization of maps data, but the data is enriched by human volunteers who never get the share of API revenue. In this age of web3 all these crowdsourcing and community keywords from companies like Google will earn more backlash than a warm welcome.

HideousKojima• 4 years ago

You should put your efforts into open street map instead

bprasanna4• 4 years ago

Yes, im looking for an alternative app for StreetComplete, which is not available in App Store.

colordrops• 4 years ago

I'm curious why you'd put so much free effort into a paid-for product by a trillion dollar company.

bprasanna4• 4 years ago

To be honest, until i saw the API side of Google Maps i was under the assumption that Google is doing great service with Google Maps. Even now Google Maps gives the accurate result thanks to all the contributors.

trapped3• 4 years ago

They are not forcing anybody to contribute, it's free and at will, just like community garden. Even walking in garden is not free, cause somebody's tax money is at use. If you are not paying taxes.

They do provide many free services. Google Maps being one of them, you liked their product and used it and it was very useful hence you contributed back to improve it.

If you had paid for their services then you could complain but if you are using it for free then don't use it for free and then complain. You could always use other products or paid products like GPS from garmin.

I don't understand why so much hate towards companies which are supporting free products and enriching lives of billions of people.

If these free products were not there can you imagine how so many poor people across globe could afford free internet technologies?

// Not google employee, opinions are mine.

asiachick• 4 years ago

you're getting the use of the service..... for free...Yeesh!

Consider before Google Maps. You'd either (a) buy a local map every few years (b) pay for a car navigation system. Now Google comes along and offers you a free maps and navigation service and you're complaining that if you try to make it better you're being screwed over? IT'S FREE!

bprasanna4• 4 years ago

Yes, it's free and good. Im not complaining about the Google Maps as a product, but i'm complaining about the system built around Google Maps. 1. I don't know how many contributors of Google Maps know the API side of the story. If they knew that will they be ready to contribute for free? 2. Though Google might have touched about selling user data in Terms & Conditions, the Terms & Conditions themselves are big trap worded with complex sentences having many pages. Yes, i may be lazy/dumb not to go through pages of T&C, and i accept that part of my mistake. 3. For a Google Maps contributor, when they contribute apart from giving them the points and appreciation, Google never tells them their contributed data is going to be sold in the form of API (in a visible manner). Whereas in YouTube the contributors do know, they may get compensated upon N number of views.

In overall the point is similar to everyone's complaint on Google, "User data is being used to their favour" but my expectation is for Google to openly and visibly tell that so all the competitors have level playing ground.

szastamasta• 4 years ago

Google is making a lot of money on Maps. The consumer app is free only so you feed them free data from your rides. They also kicked out of business all competition (hard to compete with free). And as usual with monopolies, when there’s no competition, you can do what you want. Wait for it. In few years it will be shut down or will cost a lot if they no longer can sell your data to someone else.

visarga2• 4 years ago

Maybe they are after more diverse answers than could be provided by their own employees. Meaning they don't hire diverse enough.

Animats• 4 years ago

"People like you helping people like us help ourselves."

cute_boi2• 4 years ago

Basically, "How to make people to work for free 101." What is the value of those badges?

nathanganser• 4 years ago

They could at least give out some NFTs :)

prepend• 4 years ago

I guess mechanical Turk was too expensive for Google. I’m all for collaborative, open source projects but it seems kind of skeevy for a company as profitable as Google to basically set up free labor for themselves.

I hope there are some fun 4chan stories of people breaking classification.

midenginedcoupe2• 4 years ago

So many comments bemoaning a company benefiting from the free labour of others. Wait until they hear about open source software, they'll do their nut!

midenginedcoupe2• 4 years ago

Curious as to why this is getting downvoted? It's literally how the economics of open source software works. Vanishingly few companies put back anything like the value they extract from the open source ecosystem and many, many projects are funded overwhelmingly by the free labour and effort of their committers.

trasz• 4 years ago

With Open Source everyone can benefit, including a company. In this case here only Google benefits.

asim3• 4 years ago

I was always a huge fan of Google from the late 90s onwards and was employed their from 2011 to 2013. I continue to use their services to this day. Unfortunately no matter how much you like something, when any one entity amasses this much power it's bound to make you a bit uncomfortable. I wish Google did more to anonymize and potentially distribute this kind of tech in a way that enabled anyone to run it. At the scale that Google is it's really hard to trust them with more and more personal data considering the employees could be quite literally anyone with any personal agenda that does not serve the greater good. They have no way of vetting employees to that degree and that's the biggest issue. I'm not just handing my data over to a machine or some homogeneous blob. I'm handing it to people I don't even know.

Ultimately crowdsource leads to UBI powered by Google. It's inevitable. But one entity controlling our lives is very hard to accept even if it is Google.

cmrdporcupine2• 4 years ago

I agree with many of your points, but re: employees frankly internal systems at Google are pretty heavily audited and locked down not just in regards to PII but in regards to any queries against e.g. log data that try to narrow data down to small result sets. I can't speak to these ML data sets, but I was at Google 2011-2021 and in my time I believe I applied for and got log data access twice and the restrictions were serious, and the whole thing is heavily audited.

asim3• 4 years ago

That might be true and I believe you but that doesn't change the fact that I'm more and more deeply uncomfortable handing over more and more personal data to a single large entity who basically knows as much about my life as I do. The single rogue employee might not be able to do much but inevitably all these companies suffer leaks, hacks and whatever else. Google is not immune to this. Machine learning is also a black box as much as anyone will tell you they understand it they really don't. So the potential for mishaps there are high. Again I do believe Google is the best technology company on earth, I continue to use their products, but I'm also more and more in deep contemplation on how to build viable alternatives to a lot of the products I use. I'll never be able to build things at their scale or even at the caliber of their UX but maybe there's a better alternatives as we go into ambient computing.

amelius• 4 years ago

Ultimately crowdsource leads to UBI powered by Google. It's inevitable.

UBI also provides income when the recipient performs no work at all for whatever reason. Why would a company support that?

bsenftner5• 4 years ago

UBI is the "forever ticket" that insures the status quo when UBI is institutued will be the people in power forevermore. UBI is the means in which the 1% seal their and our fates forever, because there is zero incentive to change or improve a system where all power and decisions are performed by ignored automation for a powerless, uneducated and education-incapable 99%, while the 1% in power wallow in excess.

asim3• 4 years ago

The idea is that you will continue to use Google's services on the condition of receiving UBI. Crowdsource would continue to exist until UBI is in effect and then be used as a gamified way to earn even more money. Remember UBI is not infinite money. You get a baseline for paying your bills. Above and beyond you'll need to earn whatever you need for pleasure.

PoignardAzur• 4 years ago

I know this is a hot take, but Google isn't literally evil. If there's a future when the entire world becomes a work-free utopia, they're not going to stop it just to make sure they can send children to coal mines while twirling their moustaches.

The fact that Google supports major open-source projects today is a good indicator that they're perfectly capable of participating in widely beneficial projects that only benefit them indirectly.

commoner2• 4 years ago

One of the tasks in this app is audio validation:

Audio validation: Listen to a short audio clip and determine if the pronunciation sounds natural in your language.

If this is something you're interested in doing, I recommend contributing to Mozilla's Common Voice instead. Common Voice builds freely licensed (CC-0) voice datasets that can be used by anyone, not just Google:

https://commonvoice.mozilla.org

seydor• 4 years ago

We all need to contribute to save Google from the dangers of nonrecord profits

speedgoose• 4 years ago

How much do they pay?

samoit• 4 years ago

As far as I see this, Google want us to do the job...for free. No, thank you very much. Payment for this should be mandatory. Do not work for free for a humongous company.

rwalle2• 4 years ago

Not for free! You can get useless badges!

rimeice• 4 years ago

Handover your most sensitive information and get “cool badges” in return. Sign me up!

lupire• 4 years ago

As a member of our global community of contributors, you're helping to create AI that can best serve the rich

usr11062• 4 years ago

How naive can people be? Help Google build AI? Google is very profitable business. They should pay whoever works for them.

I can do some free work for wikipedia, osm or the like. But not for Google.

bla3• 4 years ago

The app was initially released 2016, with the last update half a year ago. Did anything happen to get this posted?

If not, maybe add a (2016).

__alexs• 4 years ago

Is strange that they don't pay contributors for this at all. Google frequently pay me in Play store credit via Google Rewards to answer questions about places I've been and videos I've watched.

celdon252• 4 years ago

If Google asked me to help with solving world hunger, I wouldn’t do it. Helped them enough with my data, and my lost faith in humanity when they were complicit in ruining the web.

khaledh• 4 years ago

Aren't they already doing this with reCAPTCHA?

FernandoMax2• 4 years ago

From the authors of Google Reader, it-was-free-for-a-decade-but-now-pay-or you'll-lose-all-your-domain.com-emails-handled-by-previously-free-workspace-product, the secret agreement with Facebook for limiting competition in programatic advertising https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/17/technology/google-faceboo... now arrives "Work for us for free in our proprietary product in exchange of a badge". What a big load of shit.

number6• 4 years ago

Could have, at least, be a NFT

OrangeMonkey• 4 years ago

Could have been yes.

Imagine if it was a beanie baby instead man. I think those are going to the moon.

FernandoMax2• 4 years ago

To add insult to injury, they coined the "Don't be evil" mantra. Good for hiring, for onboarding users... And then the daughter of Eric Smith, from all the companies in the world, she chose Cambridge Analytica for the internship. AKA: the best social profiling algorithms in the world based on personal data (eroding your privacy). https://www.businessinsider.in/Emails-link-Peter-Thiels-Pala...

Media has too much fear to talk openly about what's happening with Google from some time ago.

rayrrr• 4 years ago

I suggest pairing this with another front-page HN article from today: https://thehustle.co/why-free-stuff-makes-us-irrational/ and in that article, s/us/Google/g.

zxienin• 4 years ago

I may be coming too cynical on this. So folks are supposed to add value for google for free. And Google can get away by gamification tricks?

leaflets2• 4 years ago

"work for us and don't get paid"

"But you can look at this image of a medal"

Crowdsource by Google

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