"Pokémon Go players spent ten years building a robot navigation system without knowing it"

Is there a name for this? Enabling a game or gatekeeping quiz to (secretly!) create digital maps to be exploited for commercial (or military? or surveillance?) purposes. It reminds me of what I wrote 30 years ago about the new-fangled sensors that replaced human toll takers on bridges.

Niantic just announced their delivery robot deal. When they sold Pokémon Go to Scopely last year, they kept all the data. 30 billion images from player scans over 10 years. They used it to build a navigation system that now guides delivery robots through cities in LA, Chicago and Helsinki. The pokéstops weren't random. They were placed specifically to get photo coverage of urban areas.

This happens in other companies too, google reCAPTCHA did the same thing. Every traffic light you clicked was labeling data for self-driving cars. Millions of hours of unpaid work.

Did you play Pokémon Go back in 2016? Feels weird knowing what those walks were actually for

Could we rely on future games or navigation systems?