Unknowingly?

Ingress was quite transparent about the goal of gathering real-world data to allows development of future technologies like self-driving and navigation.

It’s the reason, why I started playing it around 2012.

OK, yes, that obviously makes sense, considering the amount of these Charakters.

I know about it, but didn’t recognize the code. So I assumed, they encoded some text to make it harder to read. So I tried decoding it.

Turns out, if you decode this in UTF-16, it turns into a japanese sentence

契ȑ璝寣䇘앖噣삈

Which means (according to DeepL)

The sound of the wind rustling through the trees

And now I’m confused, why.