And you thought you were just chasing PokeMons? haha

[JohnnyRingo]

Remember the PokeMon GO game from a few years ago?

People would be directed to areas like parks, churches, or maybe a strip mall and used their cell cameras to spot and zap the hidden PokeMon figures.
Parent company Niantic brought the augmented-reality app to the masses in July of 2016, and the game made it onto over a billion phones before 2019 People were getting reported for suspicious behavior as they stomped around seeking colorful spectres.

Turns out.....

That was a secret ploy by Niantic to piece together an AI map to compete with Google Street View. They were using the supplied video from the app to create walk throughs of the world, where one can use your phone to stroll around a courthouse or take a walk through the park. Check out the box office at Madison Square.

“Over the past five years, Niantic has focused on building our Visual Positioning System, which uses a single image from a phone to determine its position and orientation using a 3D map built from people scanning interesting locations in our games and Scaniverse.”

Just when we thought we could trust a cute anime character.
I'm sure it was all detailed in the user agreement that everyone read.