How Pokémon Go made you an unpaid employee for years

Pokémon Go creators told users they wanted them to catch all 1,025 characters in a fun, augmented-reality version of their cities. What they actually wanted was an army of bots to take pictures for them all over the world to help develop their product.

Niantic L, the former Google subsidiary that created Pokémon Go, has used gamers to contribute to its mass library of images for nearly a decade in order to hone its artificial intelligence mapping models.

A country essentially has no choice but to participate in espionage in its own streets.

Users contributed to Niantic’s “Scaniverse” by enabling an option in Pokémon Go that would place the adorable monsters in the user’s real world so that when a user looked

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