To maintain that take, wouldn't you need to offer a plausible way that Niantic managed to train their Visual Positioning System using that data if the data was all bad?

I guess we don't know the terms of the deal, as far as how much they paid? So maybe they didn't pay much, so whatever data they could extract was ok for the cost.

The other point from article. I took this as experimental, so maybe we'll find out later that they really couldn't get much usable data.