Yeah I’ve known about this for like 5 years. It’s not at all new.

I thought so too. I seem to remember it almost being a selling point. Like: "Your adventures are being used to improve maps and train AI systems for the future of humanity! Yay!"

But I had a look at their old pages from 2017-2020ish in the Wayback machine and there's no mention of it. In fact, their privacy policies seemed to try to make it very clear that they don't sell or share user data except where needed to deliver the service or in anonymised aggregate to third parties (48 people went to your business while playing Pokemon!).

There's some mention of using it to advertise but none of them mention using it to build an advanced geo-spacial dataset for AI. Unless I'm missing something or reading it wrong?

Might be a Mandela effect.

I am one of the lucky 10,000 today 😄

This comes up every couple of months like some freshly uncovered secret. You can see it in Google trends too. I'm surprised to see this being so prevalent over the fediverse, I thought karma farming wasn't a thing over here.