POKEMON GO WAS USING US ALL.

While we were hunting Pikachu, Niantic was building a billion-dollar AI goldmine.
They turned our AR scans into the world's largest visual positioning dataset, now powering robot navigation with centimeter accuracy.
Their spinoff, Niantic Spatial, just partnered with Coco Robotics. 1,000+ delivery bots in LA and Chicago now use data WE collected... for free PokéStops.
1 million scans uploaded weekly. All anonymized. All "voluntary."
We thought we were playing a game.
They were training the machines.
The craziest part?
Most players have no idea their morning Pokémon hunt is teaching robots how to navigate the real world.
You can go and opt out, but that won't change the tons of data they've already collected.
This is what happens when gamification meets data harvesting at scale.