And feeding data to government agencies, no doubt

I wouldn't say unknowingly. When this thing started years ago as "Ingress" they were fairly open about how the data it collected will be helping all kinds of technology learning while you play. I loved playing Ingress, but never did try Pokemon.

No shit, and all the widely used captchas in the world have been training ML models too... as have all the voice recordings from all the smart assistants in everybody's homes, phones and cars.

I hope they don't turn our Pokémon Go to the Polls data to use for voter suppression purposes

.... Source for unknowingly??

Never played Pokémon Go. Ironically tried out Ingress for about a week as a novelty. Probably contributing to this nightmare anyway by improving OpenStreetMap.

I will never, having seen the gameplay loop, understand Pokémon Go; I do basically the same thing while surveying, but the key difference is what I'm focused on. My hobby is also a thankless, never-ending grind with threadbare social interaction where everything I do is tracked, but everyone gets the data, and I get to pay attention to real, interesting things instead of what the dopamine slot machine says I get to have today.

They even called it poke mongo, and people didn't catch on.