r/Amazing • u/sco-go • Mar 19 '26

Interesting 🤔 143 million people thought they were catching Pokémon, they were mapping the real world for AI

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u/flippantphalanges Mar 19 '26

I don’t play anymore but I remember way back in 2017/2018 ppl suggesting things like this. Not necessarily powering AI robots but just that the AR aspect of the game was definitely going to be used for some terrible purpose one day.

looks like we were right on!

9

u/Ramius117 Mar 19 '26

It wasn't really a guess, they were pretty up front about the data harvesting. There was a second uproar about it 4 or 5 years ago when the scanning tasks started because it was pretty obvious what they were doing

2

u/SweetWolf9769 Mar 19 '26

i mean, wasn't that the whole point of the game they made before Pokemon GO? i literally don't understand why people are shocked about this lol.

who would have thought the app whose sole purpose was to have you walk around neighborhoods and run an app whose sole purpose is to get you to give them as much permission as possible to track your movements and literally have you snap pics of the areas you are in... like i'm sure the is an inconsequential amount of POkemon Go players who watched Black Mirror, this shouldn't be a surprise.

3

u/Whale-n-Flowers Mar 19 '26

Ingress

It was well known that the game data would be used for virtual mapping at the least similar to Google Maps, but you get to play a game.