‘Pokémon Go’ players unknowingly trained delivery robots with 30 billion images

Niantic Spatial has partnered with Coco Robotics to use its Visual Positioning System (VPS) for navigating sidewalk delivery robots. The VPS was trained on over 30 billion images collected from Pokémon Go players, who unknowingly contributed real-world visual data while playing the game. The system can pinpoint location to within centimeters by recognizing nearby buildings and landmarks, addressing GPS limitations in dense urban environments. The partnership also highlights broader concerns about crowdsourced data being repurposed without explicit user consent, drawing parallels to Google's CAPTCHA-based AI training and law enforcement use of mapping data.