Niantic is using years of Pokemon Go player data to train AI models for spatial mapping and navigation. Millions of people spent years walking around capturing Pokemon, and they were actually generating training data for machine learning systems without explicit knowledge of what their data would be used for.

This is the "you are the product" story for the AI era. Every step you took, every gym you visited, every photo you pointed your camera at - all training data.

Here's what Niantic collected while you were hunting Pikachu: GPS coordinates, camera angles, movement patterns, spatial relationships between objects, indoor layouts, outdoor environments. Millions of users, billions of data points, all tagged and categorized by what you were trying to do in the game.

Now Niantic is using that data to build what they call a "Large Geospatial Model" - essentially an AI that understands how the physical world works. Where can people walk? How do buildings relate to streets? What does the inside of a shopping mall look like? Your gameplay provided all those answers.

Was this disclosed when people downloaded the app? The terms of service from 2016, when Pokemon Go launched, included generic language about data collection and service improvement. There was nothing specifically saying "we're building AI training datasets from your location data."

To be fair to Niantic, they probably didn't know they'd be using this data for AI training in 2016, because the current generation of AI models didn't exist yet. But that's kind of the problem - when you agree to a terms of service, you're agreeing to let a company use your data for purposes they haven't even thought of yet.

Is this the future of every app with location data? Probably. Your fitness tracker knows where you run. Your mapping app knows where you drive. Your restaurant app knows where you eat. All of that is training data for something.

The counterargument is that this data is anonymized and aggregated, and nobody's specifically tracking individuals. Which is true, but also kind of misses the point. The value isn't in knowing where you went - it's in knowing where millions of people went, and what that reveals about the structure of the physical world.

The technology is impressive. The question is whether anyone needs to know they're being used as unpaid data laborers.