Pokemon Go Popularity Accidentally Helps the Military?

Pokemon Go is in the news for the worst reason possible. And, you’re going to want to sit down before you read this story.

This week, DroneXL reported that the company who now owns the game’s date is flogging it off to defense contractors. Niantic Spatial is the proud owner of those billions of neighborhood scans. They’re using them to train a model that is set to be used in drones and military robots.

Most players would miss this kind of detail. But, when Niantic Spatial acquired the player information a while ago, some fans were worried something like this could happen. The company partnered with Vantor last year.

For those who don’t now, Vantor is a defense and intelligence firm that helps make GPS-controlled systems more accurate. Now, in those hands, billions of images of the world turn into a potent tool to make more efficient military machines.

As we said earlier, Pokemon Go players largely had no way of knowing their information would end up being used this way. But, the sterling reporting from DroneXL builds a convincing timeline for anyone curious about how we got here.

Niantic Spatial had some other uses in mind when they purchased that data set. And, now there’s a clear-cut use case that these Pokemon trainers would probably be horrified by. We really can’t have anything out here in the year 2026.

Pokemon Go Scans Switch Owners

To go further, Pokemon Go’s Pokestops prove to be a key part of the current GPS strategy for these companies. If you’ve played the wildly popular mobile game, you know the drill by now. 

Go into the surrounding world, scan a Pokestop and reap in-game benefits. It’s really simple and caught most of the world by storm back when the game launched. It was easy to get extra items and possibly rarer Pokemon by going out and finding your nearest stops.

In addition, the global health situation in 2020 only helped spread the game’s popularity after the initial craze wore off. Who else remembers going out and grinding for different monsters or using the game as an easy way to stay active back then?

But, the current situation casts all that time in a different light. Niantic asked players for permission to store this innocuous footage back when they were the sole owners of the game. Then, Niantic Spatial came in and decided that they would make a bid on the technology. 

From there, the scans changed hands and this new ownership found use for it. No one would have believed that trying to catch different variants of Pokemon would lead to literal drone programming. But, that’s where we are at the time of writing.

On social media, people are aghast at the idea of their information being used in conjunction with real weapons down the line. In fact, privacy advocates had been banging the drum about this possibility for a while. Even they couldn’t have predicted something so brazen occurring. 

(Photo Credit: Niantic)

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