Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones

As someone who works in this space, the headline is a bit of a stretch. The overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone heavy theaters of war is a tiny sliver (or zero?).

The military contractor (Vantar/Maxar) in question basically admits so but just "reserves the right" to use the data which is the political battle line ala Claude and DoD.

This is mostly an ideological battle.

If you are looking for something to channel that energy into, you could help improve open street map using streetcomplete: https://streetcomplete.app/

I stopped scanning pokestops because the effort has outweighed the rewards. A lot of the time, the requests show up as "research tasks" for a point of interest that I quickly passed by and have no interest in returning to, besides the tasks related to taking pictures of your buddy pokemon in augmented reality. Looks like I made the right choice by stopping. They do indicate to you up front that they will use the data, but it's still kind of terrible that you could be indirectly contributing to war efforts. I always assumed the data would be used for large world model training or simulations.

This article is based on reporting from Trouw: https://www.trouw.nl/redactie/PokemonGo/

I was interviewed for the Trouw piece and briefly quoted. This isn't to detract from the DroneXL piece, which adds its own angle.

Kids training drones that will kill other kids.

There is a level of evilness on that difficult to grasp. What kind of society puts that burthen on their own children?

Inequality has given power to the few deranged and depraved. No ethics, no morality, just self gratification and excess.

This shouldn't be a surprise. But at this point it feels like if you don't completely avoid participating in digital society, your data will be used against you or groups/countries you support.

There seems to be low-hanging political fruit here.

Governments have a say on to whom their weapons manufacturers sell weapons. It should be ditto for geospatial intelligence. If you want to map geospatial data in the Netherlands, you get a license from them and store the data locally and have to get permission to exfiltrate.

This won’t stop exfiltration, of course. But it should slow it down, which in the world of geospatial intel, could mean the difference between a drone finding its target and getting lost because of new construction.

An interesting thing is that in Russia, this military data grab by ostensibly 'our western would-be enemies" was supported by viral advertisement by nobody else but the head of Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill.

A story was manufactured about arresting a 22 y.o. guy in the Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints for playing Pokemon Go.

The story went hyper-hyped for weeks, with general public sentiment that once such an obscurant retrograde declares such an innocent game so evil, it must be something to absolutely install and play in spite!

And such was the way of the Pokemon Go's viral success in Russia.

(edits for factual precision)

I still feel like this is a perfect example of why we should be asking for our data to be disclosed to the public. If I take a picture of some public point of interest, they end up tagging it with their metadata and selling it, well, that's what I agreed to by not reading 20 pages of T&C's right?

But the value in that data is in the liveliness right, so at some point, would it not make sense for that data to be considered a public asset?

Why do we not demand this data be released regularly (given that the inverse tech could be developed using this as well)? If it can be used to train things used for war, could it not equally be used to train better lifesaving tech (in which case, the data should be made available to the public)?

The world is so messed up right now that this is not even the least bit surprising. In fact it's on point.

> Hanke formed Niantic Labs inside Google in 2010, then spun it out in 2015.

Spyware company spawns a new spyware company.

I'm glad I always quickly scanned the dirt. At some point I gave up completely when I heard they started banning people for dirt scans.

In the latest season they've gotten rid of the scan rewards, so I guess they got all the data they needed.

I worked at a VPS competitor of niantic.

I am conflicted on this report.

1) VPS is not new, the startup I worked at had a working public system in 2018.

2) The hard part about VPSs is not actually the navigation, its generating and querying the map.

How does the VPS work?

You build a point cloud of features (for us we paid people to go and record videos in cities, Tesla/Waymo/toyata/google drove cars niantic got it's players to take videos/pictures)

Align that point cloud to the 3d world, store it in a way that can be queried quickly (doing that quickly and at scale is still an area of research)

Then your client needs to extract the keypoints from an image and perform triangulation against the map to see where the camera was taken (There are calibration issues, but we ain't got time for that)

Now.

Niantic, from what I can see (and its been a while) has a database of key landmarks, but not of the areas inbetween. For decent navigation I would say that this is a massive problem.

I know niantic are pushing the whole "spatial world model" but frankly I don't think that scales. They stuff they have released is memorybound in vGPUs which isn't that useful for realtime querying.

I strongly suspect that actually they have a different system, much more traditional along the lines of colmap, or hloc, or something with a feedforward model in it.

However for the drone usercase, what you actually want is SLAM, which is a very different problem. for SLAM you need to build the map whilst your are moving, and then try and do loop closure or some other method to stop drift. Once you've gone there and back you can use that model for relocaliosation.

They gotta name a drone after Charizard now

Pokémon being used for war efforts is prime South Park material, too bad they already did that.

i remerber china bans it many years ago... and many people dont understand why.... never trust a USA product!

and we even have youtube videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiJOHV9rIxU

It is even worse, tax money is used for the military.

Russia is already taking advantage of preloaded terrain imagery, according to the article:

The principle is already turning up on the other side of the front, where a downed Russian drone was found matching live camera feeds against preloaded terrain imagery rather than trusting a single GPS module.

https://dronexl.co/2025/06/10/russian-ai-drone-nvidia-sony-u...

How useful is spatial data over time, does it decay or age much?

Is the geographical data more useful, or are buildings and other structures more important?

Genuinely don't know much in this space.

The moral question is if you've unknowingly contributed to war, death and destruction, or if you are actually helping drones to accurately find real targets – which hopefully are not innocent civilians but legitimate military targets.

The depravity of using a fun, uplifting game that targets kids and teenagers to train military drones boggles my mind. "The end justifies the means" continues to reign supreme

One of the reasons I stopped playing Pokémon GO.

Anyone who checked the origins of the company knew where this was going to go. Your data for sale.

There were already questions about what they were doing with the data of their prior game in the security and privacy space prior to Pokémon.

Reminds me of that sci-fi short film where kids are playing a VR game controlling virtual avatars looking for and shooting virtual enemies, while in the real world, unbeknownst to them, they are actually piloting robots that are hunting down and killing dissidents.

If I were a (potentially) hostile foreign power, I'd use a game to enlist people in the target country to record sensitive locations.

classic use case for gamification.

every time I see any startup run "games" on some aspect of daily life, it's going to go into killer robots in the end.

If the article's description evoked applications like old missile guidance system methods based on geographic features... this Wikipedia screenshot's imagery looks like it would also be good for precision drone attacks against urban small civilian structures and select individuals within/around them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Go#/media/File:Po...

Wartime propaganda poster: "Loose Surveillance Capitalism Children's Game Apps Sink Your Own Darn City, to an AI autonomous drone swarm assault that surgically neutralizes whatever the worst people want to neutralize".

AI, please rework that into a catchier slogan, and render it as a printable US WW2 OPSEC poster style PDF, but without storing my prompt and-- Hey, what's that buzzing soun--

I'm not sure this is a real problem. Google/Apple already has the world mapped out thanks to our photos in the cloud, and we literally let Tesla and others drive cars everywhere recording everything.

Pokemon Go does not really incentivises this activity. We get a poffin... Nice to have but does not worth the hassle of scanning and looking stupid on the street.

Once the data has trained a model, it also becomes almost impossible to meaningfully audit or undo

August 2016: Iran Becomes First Country to Ban Pokémon GO

https://www.avclub.com/iran-becomes-first-country-to-ban-pok...

Really smart decision, in hindsight.

"We shouldn't have maps because you can use them in war." seems like a wrong way to look at this problem.

Where are all the edgelords sending me cuckoo signs and tagging me as conspiracy theorist when I said that it compiles photogrammetry by placing pokemons at areas and angles with low image coverage?

Ah, oh yes, "we all knew it from the start", "they indicated that up front" etc.

Fuck no, everyone was foaming at the mouth how it's just a game and no way in hell an intelligence operation.

P.S. Those who "knew it from the start" yet continued helping Niantic, did you really think that the data will be used for the greater good of the humankind?

This is all for your security! Right? Right…?

Incredible how Nintendo is okay with this

>Jeroen van den Hoven, a professor of ethics and technology at TU Delft

>Van den Hoven did not condemn battlefield VPS outright. If it helps Ukraine win a just war against an aggressor, he said, that is a good development. His worry is the system falling into the wrong hands

The professor is quite flexible with his "ethics"

Nvidia wants to create a digital twin of the real world that military can use to plan their next military operations. All of those scans of cities and inside buildings will be a virtual world where war makers can plan to a very fine detail how their drones will behave.

These fools are compromised by nation states and the data isn’t just in their hands. This is why you shouldn’t collect certain types of data.

That was the conspiracy story about pokemon go when it first came out! That it will be used by the military!

This is fitting/perfect. Pokemon go is THE archetypical surveillance capitalism app. Be a drone in surveillance capitalism, know that your behavior will be used like this. Drones generally don't know or care though. Drones just have fun with tech yay fun awesome. Pokemon, gotta catch them all!!

And here I am, trying to make our product as privacy friendly as possible. Trying to follow GDPR and the AI act. Trying to respect my users..

And then there are those guys... and they make billions, by giving a flying f*ck about ethics or what so ever. And NO ONE will hold them accountable. NO ONE! Because either they lack the power, or they are bought and in it on the scheme.

I accept that the world is like that. Just like International Law has always been nothing more than an academic exercise, business doesnt care about anyone besides profit. Its fine. Its just sad also...

I keep being negative about Digital Tech in general[1]. But this is worse than my habitual negativity towards D. Tech sans AI (AI is a whole chapter onto itself).

And what can be done? The comments usually say a big fat nothing.

- Any fool already knew this comments: “shouldn’t be a surprise”

- I guess I should call my representative comments

- Just boycot tech comments

Usually nothing much actionable. Building the Ad/Surveillance/Privacy Invasion society? Very actionable, good pay, many mouths fed and FIRE accomplished by HN posters. There’s even at least one acronym for this life achievement.

Shoutout to digital activists that are doing something. I’m but an armchair complainer on this front.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48480840

Complaints in this thread, yet no one will boycott Nintendo for doing this. Ultimately, they allowed this data to be collected and then sold.

Truly dystopian. The Pokémon Company should share the blame for licensing their brand in this way without proper safeguards to prevent the data being used for this, particularly given the background of the Niantic founders

Much like Skype and Zoom were quietly used to train up fake versions of human beings.

I’m so torn between naked admiration for the sheer Machiavellian audacity of this play, and discomfort with how vulnerable everyone is to this kind of creative abuse.

Whose to say that this wasn't the plan all along?

Watch Dogs: Legion

Just wonderful.

> The games went to a Saudi sovereign wealth fund. The map went to defense.

The map went to offense. Nobody needs scans of someone else's country for "defense".

At this point it's a given that any data source that can bring an edge in a conflict is being used for exactly that. Things that film and scan surroundings are the newest addition. When a fleet of cars is taking cm or mm resolution scans of entire cities or even countries the safe assumption is that the data is funneled for intelligence and military purposes.

You should assume any camera recording will turn into a model one way or another, if not for gnss denied navigation, it will be on facial recognition or such.

Niantics founder has CIA roots... None of this is surprising.

https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/302386307352562

everything sucks :(

This is one of the most dystopian things I've heard in a long while.

I mean, we have a lot of weird shit going down right now... like AI being used to automate art BEFORE it's being used to automate dangerous and menial jobs, but knowing that people are being killed with help from data generated by millions of kids and young adults playing a fun, cute videogame is just so freaking dark and weird.

We are a very strange species and I don't have a great deal of hope for our future.

"If something is free, you are the product."

upon seeing the title i was only wondering - whose drones.

"Gotta... Kill em all?"

To those who were playing Pokemon Go ten years ago.

Thanks for playing. (You got played)

Hate to say I called this years ago....

It is a shameful use of tech.

Insane.

People literally traded military intelligence for Pokémon.

Funny how "conspiracy theorists" were once again right

Sentiment here is blowing this waaay out of proportion. It's not new technology, and its not particularly scary or dystopian.

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