alt Hacker NewsI stopped scanning pokestops because the effort has outweighed the rewards. A lot of the time, the requests show up as "research tasks" for a point of interest that I quickly passed by and have no interest in returning to, besides the tasks related to taking pictures of your buddy pokemon in augmented reality. Looks like I made the right choice by stopping. They do indicate to you up front that they will use the data, but it's still kind of terrible that you could be indirectly contributing to war efforts. I always assumed the data would be used for large world model training or simulations.
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The closest stop to me is between a dog park and a school - scanning it would have been an awkward situation, to say the least. And as you said, for rewards that aren't worth it. I got used to having that "Scan" task just sitting at the top of my list, never to be touched. But I noticed earlier this week that it's gone - and scanning stops doesn't give a new scan task.
I believe some of the data was added to their scaniverse app.
I guess this also explains how they were paying for the free 3d model photogrammetry processing that app does.
> I always assumed the data would be used for large world model training or simulations.
That was the initial objective, improving navigation by having people walk slowly on pedestrian accessible locations instead of only the main roads. But once that data is collated, it could go anywhere and you've signed any rights to what happens with it away when you agreed to the Ts & Cs.