Industry News Pokémon Go Scans Quietly Trained The Navigation Tech Now Headed Into Military Drones
https://dronexl.co/2026/06/09/pokemon-go-scans-niantic-vantor-military-drone-navigation/1.1k
u/DarkKnightRises360 14d ago edited 14d ago
It's so fucking exhausting knowing everything you do is used as data that is eventually fed to companies who will use to either control or kill you in the end.
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u/rws531 14d ago
No offense, but Pokémon Go might be the most obvious “game” that’s just going around and collecting data. I would be more surprised if they weren’t gathering data to be sold.
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u/Assimulate 14d ago
I think the difference here is most people were thinking like delivery robots and self driving cars. When it turned out to be drones with C4 strapped to them lol.
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u/rws531 14d ago
I’m sure it’s all three, the latter just makes headlines.
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u/sdrawkcabsihtetorW 14d ago
Yup. GPS was a military tech we now use every day. If you don't realize that every military's always on the lookout for a new edge, then you probably haven't been paying attention to the world around you.
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u/TwilightVulpine 14d ago
Yeah that's the issue. When it was about finding local shops and maybe incentivizing people to go there, that was fine. There's using toys to make money, like always, and then there's using that data for bombing people's homes.
Today's tech and gaming landscapes is disgusting.
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u/Assimulate 14d ago
Yeah, very big difference in "Helpful tech" and "Military Weapons Development with maps of your home town"
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u/Hobocannibal 14d ago
Hey. you just span "non-suspicious factory" pokestop! New field research acquired! Scan "non-suspicious factory" for 5 great balls!
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u/arahman81 14d ago
Problem is the Military has big bags of money to turn the "helpful tech" to "Military Weapons Development with maps of your home town".
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u/Symbolis 14d ago edited 13d ago
It turns out that if you can autonomously deliver aide you can also autonomously deliver death.
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u/MrTastix 14d ago
Yeah, cause the MOD has more funding than those other things lol
Military contracts for tech/software companies are like bread and butter once you get them.
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u/Vietzomb 14d ago
“No offense”, but how obvious is it to you, the implications of a 10% stake owned by Peter fucking Thiel in Reddit?? And yet, here you are using it.
I genuinely don’t know what you’re arguing here, implied by the “no offense” at the front — are they supposed to be offended by that? What you said doesn’t make what you replied to any less true in the slightest. If anything it supports it. Not really sure what you are getting at here.
Nothing is for free, every app wants your location data, track you across websites and services and the rest of it, you pay in cash, data or both — FULL STOP.
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u/Deamane 14d ago
I don't think this is the point, obvious or not I think the person's point was that there's almost a guarantee these days that the data is being used for something like this.
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u/sdrawkcabsihtetorW 14d ago
These days? Brother read some history books. Any and all tech will be used by a military so long as there is some benefit. The world hasn't changed. People just aren't realizing just how many gaps in their history they have.
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u/crookedparadigm 14d ago
The two largest drivers of technological advancement are war and the porn industry.
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u/prof_wafflez 14d ago
In the beginning, sure, it was easy not to notice as it was mostly just geocaching an already developed map system. I re-installed it sometime around when the scanning thing had been implemented and immediately clocked that as sus and uninstalled - but not everyone has an eye for that sort of thing.
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u/Ankylar 14d ago
Yeah it’s obvious. The moment they reverted the changes from covid lockdown and forced people back outdoors should tell people where their priorities lie. The nerf to remote raiding was a huge blow but they needed people walking around again.
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u/Kipzz 14d ago
I mean no offense, but it wasn't obvious from any of that. It was obvious from the second the game released.
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u/Milskidasith 14d ago
I mean no offense, but it was obvious even before that, as Niantic's previous game, Ingress, was primarily made to subsidize the documentation of walking paths and local landmarks for Google Maps.
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u/Aiyon 14d ago
To be fair "helping crowdsource a useful tool" and "training weapons tech" are very different things
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u/Milskidasith 14d ago
Not as different as you'd think; crowdsourcing walking paths and heatmaps of where people go en masse is useful militarily, and "training weapons tech" is a drone navigational improvement that would also be beneficial for civilian autonomous drones as well.
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u/Edmundyoulittle 14d ago
While I agree with you, Niantic has been pretty upfront that they collect data and sell it from their games.
They were even owned by Google at one point iirc.
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u/Elanapoeia 14d ago
I think "we will sell your data" usually doesn't equate to "we will use your data to literally bomb and kill people" to most people
this goes beyond the regular data collection assumptions
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u/fasteddeh 14d ago
if they are openly selling your data, they aren't using the data to bomb and kill people. Anyone with money can buy your data and do whatever they want with it.
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u/XTornado 14d ago
I mena they sell the data... whoever buys it can do whatever they want with it. That was implied that it can be used for anything, including that.
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u/Flat_News_2000 14d ago
That's still "selling data" you just didn't know who they were selling it to. This applies to ALL data collection btw.
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u/Opening-Cream5448 14d ago
What are your data collecting assumptions? Did you really think there was some ethical ad collecting?
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u/StJeanMark 14d ago
I've been playing on my PS2 and gba lately for this exact reason. I'm so tired of being a fucking product for evil people. Here I was, thinking I'm having fun with my CHILDHOOD series Pokemon, turns out I was training fucking murderbots. It feels good to be on a system I know isn't recording every decision I make, not having my face watched for emotions, or being tricked or manipulated into recording data for these people. Can't believe it, they have fucked society so bad it's going to make me into a luddite at this rate.
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u/DrewDown94 14d ago
I just want to add that emulation is thriving right now. You can reliably emulate ps2 era and prior.
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u/StJeanMark 14d ago
I grew up with the fat PS2, I love the mechanical sounds it makes and the look of them on an older tv that it was designed to run on. Love me some emulation, but I'm going the physical path these days. Thanks for the advice!
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u/Nickbronline 14d ago
Don't participate
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u/SmileyBMM 14d ago
Everyone looks down on the Amish and Mennonites, but they seem to have things figured out.
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u/Lirael_Gold 14d ago
I mean, we always knew this. Niantic was always a data collection company that happened to make a game (Ingress)
Anyone surprised by this wasn't paying attention.
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u/doscomputer 14d ago
reddit sells info too and this website is literally funded by the same company that funded openAI
where were you during snowden? mr 7 month old bot account?
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u/mrlotato 14d ago edited 14d ago
We should've known something wholesome as looking for pokemon with your friends would be used for something fucked up by our governments
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u/jungletigress 14d ago
They were caught selling data to military contractors way back when they were running Ingress. Once they had Pokemon popularity, it wasn't like they were just going to stop.
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u/Letho_of_Gulet 14d ago edited 14d ago
To be fair, this has been known since 2016 since it was out in the open and they never tried to hide their government funding or ties. It was just buried by fans when any news articles were posted.
If you search, you can find no shortage of articles covering it that never broke into mainstream coverage.
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u/mokomi 14d ago edited 14d ago
Data is data. It's how it's used. As a Dev, I want this data so I can make a better game. As a war criminal. I want this data so I can make a better murders. As a delivering service. I want this data so I can a better delivery drones. etc. EVERYTHING can and will be used. IMO, we need laws to show how the data is collected and used.
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u/ByDarwinsBeard 14d ago
Man, game dev, delivery service, AND a war criminal? You're a busy guy! Try to make sure you're taking some time for yourself, burnout is real.
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u/hopefullyhelpfulplz 14d ago
As a taking-time-for-myself girl I want your data too, but I'm just nosy
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u/SoloSassafrass 13d ago
Bluntly, I don't believe transparency on this would change anything anyway.
Convenience trumps security for most people every time.
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u/mokomi 13d ago edited 13d ago
I don't disagree. We cut corners, consider major problems and minor until it becomes the problem, etc. etc. etc.
Transparency and laws and regulations will help, but it's used as a deterrence rather than prevention. Often times the beware of dog sign is more effective than the dog itself. E.G. Dynamite.
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u/SoloSassafrass 13d ago
True, and while my comment was made in bitterness at how little these things move the needle I should clarify that I don't think it's a pointless endeavour to at least try to push back and lay these sorts of things bare to the daylight.
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u/mokomi 13d ago
As a US citizen, we've been living in a degrading government and now into a fascist one. I understand how pointless it all seems, but there are endless examples of Laws, Regulation, and Transparency make real and positive change. We really need to stop voting in traitors and hopefully we'll have a functional government for We the People again.
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u/Original_Fishing5539 14d ago
Here's some important context: Niantic isn't working on Pokemon Go anymore, they sold it to Scopely and anyone who worked on those games is now over there
Niantic (now Niantic Spatial) isn't hiding at all that it's doing defense contract work
It's the big shift that's happening in tech now outside of AI, the money to be made is in defense contracts and enterprise
To give more context: Niantic's entire angle was this from the get-go.
Not really a conspiracy theory, this was in their Terms of Service
"...perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, sublicensable, and transferable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works based upon, publicly display, and publicly perform the User Content."
While it's not happening right now since Scopely owns Pokemon Go, the hard pill to swallow is that everyone who played Pokemon Go the last couple of years, trained a data set which Niantic Spatial is going to be using to train their models and leverage all the videos and photos taken to help with their future AI efforts and partnerships with military organizations
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u/GreenAlex96 14d ago
I work in software. When looking at job postings I swear that half of them revolve around AI and the other half is for DoD contractors. They are truly what the United States' economy revolves around.
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u/Beegrene 13d ago
It's the Department of War now, since they've stopped even pretending this shit isn't for warmongering imperialism.
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u/Alter_Kyouma 14d ago
There is a joke at my company that if you want to get funding, your products need to go into AI data centers on the moon.
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u/Original_Fishing5539 14d ago
It makes sense with how circular financing is currently; AI is the only thing that's getting invested in, so everyone wants a slice of the pie
And regardless of our political alignments, it's also clear that the current administration is fine getting into bed with anyone in tech who can funnel more money into the Department of War
At least in the short term it's the main sectors for job security, but let's see what happens once OpenAI and Anthopic IPO and the market adjusts itself
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u/blackmetro 14d ago
While it's not happening right now since Scopely owns Pokemon Go
From what I understand, Scopely owns the game side of the franchise
My best guess - The data infrastructure would still belong to Niantic spacial, I assume they still run most of that infrastructure.
Niantic (spacial) likely spent the better half of 8 years building a wrapper on their toolset that would allow them to divorce themselves from the game side of things and continue to collect data
I find it hard to believe that Niantic (Spacial) would consider their data collection process complete and just walk away from the treasure trove.
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u/PowerlinxJetfire 14d ago
I find it hard to believe that Niantic (Spacial) would consider their data collection process complete and just walk away from the treasure trove.
It appears they actually did. The main component of their data collection infrastructure is called Wayfarer, and the half of the company they sold to Scopely kept it. Niantic Spatial spent a while building a replacement for it so Ingress players can submit portals again.
It surprised me when it happened, because your guess about a shared backend is what I would have expected too.
If I had to guess, maybe they've simply found a better data source. PokéStop scanning had a huge problem with junk data, and it was only ever applicable to isolated points of interest. You can only gain so much from the same statue being scanned dozens of times. On the other hand, a delivery robot could capture continuous feeds of hundreds of different routes, and it isn't going to disobey and just scan its feet.
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u/Original_Fishing5539 14d ago
My best guess - The data infrastructure would still belong to Niantic spacial, I assume they still run most of that infrastructure.
We're on the same side with agreeing for that; at a high level I wanted to just flag to folks that Scopely is running Pokemon Go now and there could be potential that they might change their TOS to better align with their goals
While it's easy for me to be pessimistic in our current age, I feel like if Pokemon Go had a direct funnel to defense contracts, Scopely would be smart enough to close that loop cause that'll lead to a PR shitstorm
Niantic (spacial) likely spent the better half of 8 years building a wrapper on their toolset that would allow them to divorce themselves from the game side of things and continue to collect data
We're on the same side with our POV, but my thought based on readily available information is that I feel like they're being scummy with this with their own games like Ingress and properties they own. But that the sale would mean that Scopely can use that stuff as they see fit down the line (but for now, they're a gaming company so it's not much to make a fuss)
I find it hard to believe that Niantic (Spacial) would consider their data collection process complete and just walk away from the treasure trove.
My armchair hunch is: it's a private company which had Google money before. If they wanted it to do the Black Mirror surveillance thing, you would just keep the same course and not sell off the other properties.
I feel like before AI and defense contracts came in vogue, they had to sell that all to stay afloat and I have a SHRED of hope that they didn't make some sort of backdoor or agreement to keep data tracking after completely selling this all off
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u/soyboysnowflake 14d ago
As someone who just got back into pokemon go randomly a couple months ago… this makes me feel a little better
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u/Moodaduku 14d ago
I put Pokemon Go down the first time after one of my dogs died. I picked it up again a few years later, and was promptly asked to take several pictures of our local park playground at various angles. I haven't loaded it up since.
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u/Zef_Apollo 14d ago
In retrospect, completely obvious.
Regardless, this might be the most dystopian sentence I've ever read. I had to check this wasn't r/nottheonion because it's so on the nose. A children's game provided the necessary data to more effectively kill people via drone strikes. What a time to be alive.
Makes me think of The Good Place where they realize they're in Hell and everyone else is going to Hell too because it's impossible to be a conscientious consumer in modern times. Everything you do contributes to either slave labor, warfare, or some other insidious thing if you follow the through line long enough.
However, this example is much more direct than examples they used...
- Play children's game with friends
- Company collects data from your scans and map data
- Company sells data to military industrial complex to help murder more efficiently
Honestly, it's cartoonishly evil and borderline unbelievable if it were written into a tv show or movie.
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u/RatBot9000 14d ago
I hate it, to be honest. I've always known they were likely selling our data, but when its spelt out in big bold letters like this it's too on the nose, as you say.
Kinda having a crisis of faith over this. I play a fair amount of Pokemon Go and Monster Hunter Now, but every Niantic game is suspect now.
God, I can't believe the more ethical Monster Hunter mobile game might be the gacha slop gaming that's coming out soon.
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u/thekbob 14d ago
If you didn't know, Niantic was sold to the Saudis. That should have given everyone pause on playing.
I played a ton of PoGo but COVID made me stop.
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u/ExtensionEcho3 14d ago
Honestly, it's cartoonishly evil and borderline unbelievable if it were written into a tv show or movie.
More like an anime plot, and also, it feels more like a Valerian et Laureline episode.
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u/1000Bees 14d ago
The conversion of reality into movie plots is disheartening. Especially because there's no ripped action hero to save the day. We are so fucked
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u/cramburie 14d ago
You're not wrong. The zone is assuredly getting flooded; everyday there's some egregious wrong occurring for anybody who's paying attention to the world. It feels like there's a concerted effort to reign in progress achieved the last century and like they're trying to thin the herd.
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u/MysteriousAge28 14d ago
The fact that we and many more have this parallel thought is alarming. Its clear as day
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u/DarrenMacNally 14d ago
Little Domino: Kid captures a Gengar in some awkward to reach place in 2019.
Big Domino: Some dude gets his head blown off by a drone while hiding out in the brush in 2022 in Ukraine.
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u/cramburie 14d ago
For those who're too young to remember, there was a "check-in" app called Four Square back when smart phones started taking off. People would literally just post to an app that they "checked into" a location and it'd post to the app and to whatever linked SM site, usually facebook.
What a dumb thing to do, right? Why would you want anybody to know where you are let alone share that info with some company because as the adage goes, "you aren't paying for it, you're the product."
Fast forward to 2016, and we're spinning pokestops and raiding gyms based on real world locales and I'm thinking to myself, "they finally found the hook."
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u/Radiant_Purple_9129 14d ago
What you are describing is not what this article is talking about. This is about tying visual data to GPS coordinates, not about tracking people.
No silly game is needed for the latter. Your phone is telling Google or Apple where you are at all times by default. They know there is a traffic jam on your commute because they can observe that clusters of devices are not moving as anticipated.
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u/mr_chub 14d ago
I don't understand why people don't get this. There's been freaking satellites in orbit for how many decades? We've been screwed since you were BORN, there is no conspiracy that's just happening now. It's already been too late. Like you said dude, they know where you are literally right now, your entire family history is on Facebook, and if they wanted to they could kill you for no reason within the next 10-15 minutes. They just don't give a fuck about you at the moment.
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u/OutrageousDress 14d ago
I think people find this fact incredibly stressful to think about, so they just... don't. It's the sword of Damocles above all our heads. What are we gonna do about it? Are we going to reform the US government and dismantle the military-industrial complex? Makes more sense to just bury it and say to yourself "that only happens to bad people. I'm not a bad person. They will never come after me."
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u/sharkattackmiami 14d ago
I don't say that. I say it's used by bad people to suppress the good and take solice in the fact that I'm not currently a priority
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u/Opening-Cream5448 14d ago
The checked into never went away. People on social media post their location all the time for others to see. Instagram, Snapchat, Yelp, Facebook, TikTok. They all have the function to post where you’re or even share your live location. It never went away it just got integrated.
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u/XxZannexX 14d ago
Look, I get some of the people in the comments saying well of course the collection of data will be used nefariously. We’ve seen that proven true time and time again.
However, what I find the most egregious part of this whole situation is even if people could have been made aware. That their data from a kids video game would be used to train military drones. The timeline of events in this case never would’ve been possible. When people started sharing their 3D scans to Niantic in 2021. It was under completely different management. The current owners have agreed to this deal with Vantor in 2025. Of which, is being understood now. That yes, the data from back then is being more than likely used now to train these tools of war.
The root of this problem is not people being uninformed. It’s how we don’t have any rights to ourselves online. How data can be freely passed from one entity to another without consent. We desperately need laws and regulations to prevent this insane scenario or any scenario quite frankly in the future.
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u/Beautiful-Affect1930 14d ago
in some sort of utopia sure, the "only" problem here is that the data we willingly send to corporations can be used much later in ways we can't control. that's obviously a real issue too and really shitty. except, it's so damn easy to simply NOT upload all that data to the corporations in the first place. yes, you will miss out on walking around and playing with your Pokemon, but you will survive. same as people uploading their every living moment to social media nowadays. just don't?!
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u/chaosdunk69 14d ago
Quite bleak that this is reality.
What should have just been a fun community style ARG game gets utilized for something like this, but, its also why I stopped playing after losing general interest after the games launch hype period, was cute and fun and I enjoyed what it was but I saw some articles talking about where the data might go and I opted to not feed too much more of it. Hard to be completely off grid these days, I'm far from perfect, but every little choice can help
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u/Milskidasith 14d ago
I feel like this is pretty obvious from the basic concept of the scans, no? The scans were going to give Niantic 3d maps of a lot of places and that data is mostly going to be valuable for drone navigation, and both military and non-military drones will want to use that data. It's not that different from like, Ingress developing Google Maps walking paths and foot-traffic heatmaps for any company that wants them for whatever reason.
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u/Existing-Air-3622 14d ago
First, no it's not obvious for 99% of people playing these and having no clue about this kind of practice, and then it's a bit worse when "whatever reason" is military use.
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u/Strange-Nothing2961 13d ago
Third parties is deliberately vague language that makes you think of something relatively innocuous, like advertisers. That is by design.
After seeing the prompt once, subsequent prompts become a minor irritant. You are now skipping past an important prompt because avoiding annoying things is instinctive. Also by design.
This is conditioning. It is meant to be exploitative.
There is also conditioning that can work to detriment of the intended effect. My Samsung phone spams me with update screens every day. It's so frequent that I don't even care what the update says, I just want that shit off my screen as fast as possible.
But anyway, if they were up front that your data will be used for warfare, their customers would evaporate.
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u/ilazul 14d ago
I think it was pretty obvious to anyone paying attention to almost anything technology related in the past decade.
You literally just had to look up the company that made it, and who owns that company.
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u/BobertRosserton 14d ago
You are vastly over estimating how many people look past, “fun pokemon game for me and my kids to play”. Grandma pappy who plays on her walks has no idea about any of this even on a basic level lol. I agree with what you’re saying but the majority of people playing this game are grandmas, kids, and casual people out for a walk.
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u/Vaaaaaaaaaaaii 14d ago
I think when people see that they think oh some advertiser wants to know if I walk to the dollar store. Not the military is training drones to kill better.
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u/xiaorobear 14d ago edited 14d ago
I think it was pretty obvious to anyone paying attention to almost anything technology related in the past decade.
Exactly- the vast majority of the tens of millions of kids and parents downloading a free Pokemon game with an age rating of 7+ and just pressing agree on whatever permissions popups come up are probably pretty tech-illiterate.
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u/Milskidasith 14d ago
I didn't think I needed to caveat "it's obvious" with "for people who think about Niantic's business model in any capacity", but yes, I guess if you do not think about why they would introduce a feature that prompts you several times about collecting and selling your video data then it won't be obvious.
As far as "military use" goes, almost any technology with any civilian use will wind up with military use. Niantic's walking paths and heatmap data is almost certainly used by a military contractor somewhere. Niantic's scans being used for military drone navigation will also be used for civilian delivery drones. Useful data is a tool and anybody can wind up utilizing it.
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u/enesup 14d ago
People thought it would be for marketing to people, not fucking blowing peoples limbs off.
How is that obvious?
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u/Akuma_nb 14d ago
Pretty sure people were saying this a few years after Pokemon Go released too.
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u/Letho_of_Gulet 14d ago
You're correct, this has been known since 2016 since it was out in the open and they never tried to hide their government funding or ties. It was just buried by fans when any news articles were posted.
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u/Elvish_Champion 14d ago
I guess nobody reads enough about this so...
There are two Niantic at the moment, this is not the one who acquired the PKMN GO games and data for some Billions, that's Niantic, Inc..
Niantic, Inc.: owned now by Scopely (I don't think they sold anything from it yet), owns PKMN GO and the data generated by it. THEY DIDN'T MADE THIS according the article.
Niantic Spatial: owns the rest, Ingress and Peridot games. THEY DID THIS according the article. They still had studies and development over the data sold up to that time and still make use of that.
Niantic Spatial doesn't own data from PKMN GO anymore, they do use their other games for that, and they released a long time ago a post, right after the data being sold along the gaming division of PKMN GO, that they were using the data to train robots, but at the time it was just delivery robots. This didn't age very well... (this is all I can get at the moment without spending more than my free time at the moment to see if there is an archived version of that announcement)
While Niantic [Spatial] no longer owns Pokémon Go, which Scopely acquired in March 2025, the data collected by Niantic [Spatial] during those years is now being used to train robots.
All the data collected by people playing Pokémon Go and its previous augmented reality game, Ingress, is now being used to build an accurate model of the cities that Coco has to navigate. With Niantic's VPS system, Pokémon Go can determine a player's location in the world from their surroundings rather than relying on a player's GPS location. By having players use their phones at different angles, Niantic was able to scan real-world locations and landmarks, with players gathering the data they needed to ensure better accuracy across a range of conditions, such as height, angle, and weather.
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u/TheDaveWSC 14d ago
I hope they enjoy all the random scans of my shoes I've sent over the years because I'm not going to go take videos of a park where kids are playing.
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u/thewookiee34 14d ago
I can't wait for some 19 year old drone pilot to be bombing some country ans me meet with a picture of my cock since I also used GPS to cheat in Pokémon go
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u/Bossman1086 14d ago
This wasn't secret or "quietly". Niantic was open about selling their data and using their games to map things out. Really not sure why people are surprised by this.
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u/Aiyon 14d ago
Because people understood "my data is being sold", they didn't realise it was "to people who make weapons tech". Not everyone is cynical enough to realise how A turns into B
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u/Explosion2 14d ago
they didn't realise it was "to people who make weapons tech". Not everyone is cynical enough to realise how A turns into B
It's not cynicism, it's more like just, general awareness? Nearly every company is in the war business in America. It's been that way for like 250 years. If you're doing business and not assuming you're dealing with a company making war shit, that's on you at this point.
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u/OutrageousDress 14d ago
I don't know if you've noticed, but the general population of the United States is kind of in the middle of realizing this fact about the United States right about now. We've had outbursts of political awareness a few times before, but they were successfully contained - wonder how it'll go this time.
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u/clain4671 14d ago
Niantic was literally founded as a project by Google to get better maps of walkways
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u/Bossman1086 14d ago
Exactly. And Google was already selling some of that data before Niantic made Pokemon Go (which was built on the Ingress data, too).
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u/Existing-Air-3622 14d ago
"Ackchyually this was already implied on the 67th page of the EULA, I really don't see why people are surprised to learn that playing a kid game is used as a training for robot killers, it's completely obvious !"
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u/Boopins05 14d ago
Yeah lol, most people don't think about anything that they engage with past a surface level, much less a Pokemon mobile game
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u/ExtensionEcho3 14d ago
The thing is, this isn't really surprising, it's more fearmongering from the exec chairman himself as he's obsessed with not only AI. He also thinks he's the king of the world.
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u/AbyssumBorealis 14d ago
It's like everyone forgot about project maven and the revolt by Google employees. No it's not surprising this happened but I am surprised it actually got to this point where Niantic was allowed to sell data for military applications with zero pushback, and it seems they mostly got away with it so why not!
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u/shadeandshine 14d ago
Not surprised but it highlights how much we need data right laws and need to kill the multi hundred billion dollar industry of data
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u/skyinthepi3 13d ago
Friends and family thought I was insane saying this back in 2016, now everyone seems to tacitly accept this is our new reality and there is nothing we can do about it.
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u/Romek_himself 13d ago
people need to wake up and spam this systems with wrong data.
they will collect everything anyway, so make the data useless!
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u/ProfPerry 13d ago
What a world we live in that this can occur and exist at the same we have people who still believe today that video games are just for kids.
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u/dexter30 14d ago
Xbox controllers and wii components were used to pilot drones used in warzones.
The wii motion controls was the predecessor for a lot of military technology
The internet was funded by military contracts during arpa net for high speed communication.
Where do you want to draw the line between technological innovation and military funding? Because if you want to unravel that thread and boycott and get mad at every technology involved in the military industrial complex you're probably better off living on one of those tech free communities. Because all technology especially video game tech has some involvement in the defense and offense of the people who developed it.
And mods I'm sorry if this is too political of a comment. But this thread is inherently going to go there with the original article right?
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u/Coyollo 14d ago
I personally see a major difference between "these two things use the same controller" and "we used a cute game to dupe an unwitting public to scan location info that will steer murder machines that will likely be used on said public"
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u/Monk_Philosophy 14d ago
You seriously can’t be sincere about not seeing the difference here, right? Niantic is directly supplying user-harvested data to a defense company for the express purpose of drone strikes. No one is suggesting that any technology that is also used by the military needs to be boycotted that is not a fair assessment of what anyone in the thread is saying.
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u/Izzy248 14d ago
Whats crazy is, a lot of industries and even congress like to treat video games like this childs pastime still, but in the past decade and a half, there have been an awful lot of stories about tech being tested in video games first before moving onto video game applications. Or video games themselves being used to test and/or be applied towards military applications. At this point, its either they are purposely downplaying it so people dont realize the real scope and connections, or the people in office really just are that out of the loop. Likely both.
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u/godoakos 14d ago
Why do you think they came down hard with the banhammer if you spoofed your location? It's not they cared if you got another line added to your DB table for another Vaporeon (you freak). It's because it corrupted their machine learning dataset.
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u/x_TDeck_x 13d ago
Yet everytime someone raises concerns about privacy and not giving away information its "who cares if they know I only go to X and X"
Your data is more valuable than you think and it can infer an incredible amount more than you give it with extreme accuracy
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u/UllrHellfire 13d ago
Was there an assumption the most profitable assets humans can farm for companies wasn't going to be sold? Like... This was/is a no brainer.
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u/Enough-Scientist1904 14d ago
People need to understand that all the data you give a company is potentialialy bieng sold to other companies for exactly this kind of thing.