Hanke recounts that Pokémon Go was born out of Google Maps, which also supplied most of the game’s original development team. Indeed, Street View’s mystery engineer, Marius Milner, had joined Hanke in this new phase of incursion. By 2010, Hanke had set up his own launch pad, Niantic Labs, inside the Google mother ship. His aim was the development of “parallel reality” games that would track and herd people through the very territories that Street View had so audaciously claimed for its maps. In 2015, following the establishment of the Alphabet corporate structure and well after the development of Pokémon Go, Niantic Labs was formally established as an independent company with $30 million in funding from Google, Nintendo (the Japanese company that originally hosted Pokémon on its “Game Boy” devices in the late 1990s), and the Pokémon Company.

Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Cap…, loc. 976