The blog post explains that “Over the past five years, Niantic has focused on building our Visual Positioning System (VPS), which uses a single image from a phone to determine its position and orientation using a 3D map built from people scanning interesting locations in our games and Scaniverse,

The makers of popular game Pokemon Go have developed their own AI model for the geospatial tech which uses data from millions of smartphones. Niantic is the company that runs the AR-based game played by millions across the globe and this update will surely be of concern to many who were not aware of its intentions.