Yes the entire purpose of Ingress was to make meat modules walk to under-documented locations, take pictures, and indicate points of interest. The meat modules seemed to think it was "fun". Hard to explain.

Was a player, but to this day I still can't figure out why "Go there, take pictures, and 'capture' a location" can be THAT beneficial when it come to map software optimization.

I know the game certainly records my location which maybe good for discovering walk route, but other data they've collected seems (I guess) useless. How can picture of sculptures improve map quality? Kind curious.

A level 40 player (deeply committed to get that high) creates a stop with a photo of a statue in his back yard fountain so he could cheat. You could wait until multiple people submit it, or just allow it and just see how many people visit it. Either way, you get validation data on it.

Conversely, a player creates a stop for a new statue that was just placed outside of a government building in the last few weeks. This stop gets visited hundreds or thousands of times a day. You've now identified a hub. This hub can be used to validate the existence of other items of interest in the near vicinity.

It makes more sense now, but I still got questions.

You see, when you created an in-game location, you're inviting players to go there, regardless whether or not the location is popular in the real life. Dedicated players may take a detour from their normal day-to-day route just to hit that location to gain in-game advantages, which will generate data noise if the map software wants to use players data to improve their product for normal non-player users.

Also, let's don't forget products like Google Maps and Bing Maps are already collecting users locations. And in addition to the location, it also knows where the user was, where the user wants to go and how the user would go there (Take bus, drive, walk etc). That, is high quality data (Better than a Niantic game could provide) that generates profit directly.

All the reasons combine, I think I still have some doubts about that business model.

A couple points here.

First, you get data about how pedestrians can reach all the truly popular locations. If you also get extra data about how pedestrians can reach various irrelevant locations, okay, that doesn't have value but that's not harmful; what matters is that all kinds of niche landmarks that would be interesting to tourists are somewhere in your data.

Second, people making a detour from their normal day-to-day route to reach some location is the whole point - these are local people with knowledge of how their city works; you don't want to measure how tourists usually get from landmark A to landmark B; you'd want to see what shortcuts an optimizing local would take when getting from landmark A to landmark B - which is different than simply looking at random people walking habits with no intent to optimize the route; the gamification provides an incentive to optimize routes and allows you to harvest the knowledge of that optimization.

If someone tells google maps that they want to go from A to B, and google maps tracks how they got there, then it doesn't harvest any information about the best route because the user doesn't know it, they wanted a recommendation and likely tried to follow it even if it's very suboptimal, so you'll just get a reprocessed version of the data you already had (and gave to that user). On the other hand the data from Niantic is useful so that Google maps can make a better recommendation.

Third issue is that the Niantic process also allows you to detect undesirable routes. If Google maps directs a tourist from A to B through a shortcut that's passable but unpleasant in some manner, then they'll take that route; and if they send another one there, they'll also go there, because they don't know better and the alternatives are (probably) not obvious. You'll only get a signal of people not going there if it's really bad e.g. impassable.

Niantic, however, can detect that most people who want to go from A to B (because of game incentives) but who know all the routes from A to B (instead of asking for directions like the google maps usecase) are intentionally taking a longer route for whatever reason - which is again useful data for improving Google Maps recommendations.

I imagine, as well as user verification (mentioned down-thread) that statues provide a known location to remove systematic errors from a users GPS data.

In my limited experience it's not been uncommon for a GPS track to run parallel to the actual track. Having known markers (that are small, and can be treated as points) means traces can be pinned.

Just a guess.

For one they created the dataset that Pokémon Go uses and that game is massively profitable.

I think it doesn't improve directly the maps, but it improves the whole experience of using Google maps. Maybe they could reuse the pics uploaded by ingress users and display them on Google maps.

Maps are usually static snapshots in time. Really good maps would constantly update to show changes in a living world as quickly as possible.

It was, in fact, fun.

Do you use a search engine? Social media? Any modern online game? A connected smart home? A smart phone without its privacy settings altered? A modern flat screen tv? A modern car? All of them do behavioral extraction in one form of another. Often under the guise of entertainment.

To single out Ingress or Pokémon Go seems to ignore the much bigger problem.

And, as an Ingress oldie, it was a lot of fun. We planned for weeks to cover the northern hemisphere, preparing with people in four different continents. I’ve met people and seen parts of the world I would never have met or seen otherwise.

Humans are so competitive that they'll often take pride in being the worst at something, because even that's a perverse way to be at the top of the list. That you can create an arbitrary game, seed it with some people to set up a ranking, and open it up to a bunch of people and they'll go crazy figuring out how to rank themselves using your criteria isn't all that surprising.

Fun anecdote about that: During crunch on a new android device (or release? I think it was a device), the new automatic pre-fill for home/work had decided that many android team members lived at the office and worked at home.

I got this "feature" at Google I/O. It promptly decided I lived at the Motel 6 and worked at the Moscone Center.

That's not related to the game. I got the same thing without ever playing it