I had assumed the purpose of the data was more in generalising across variegated input sources to better allow the drones to fly on their own in urban settings, aka, adapt more readily to randomness? Better datasets for multimodal training etc.

I am not joking though, I really would consider any data generated on public assets to be considered "releasable" to the public. How many people should get killed by self-driving cars because the company making the cars didn't have enough data to train proper models?

I am all for public code. But mind: the whole point of Pokemon go is to collect data. If they have to publish it as open data their business case goes away.

This may be good and we'd still not have the data (but "they" can collect on their own privately/secretly)