What Were You Really Doing Playing Pokémon GO?

Remember Pokémon GO? Summer of 2016. People were walking into traffic, trespassing in cemeteries, and wandering into strangers' backyards — all to catch a cartoon creature on their phone. It was absurd and charming and I'd be lying if I said I didn't at least try it. But here's the thing nobody was asking at the time: what was Niantic really building?

Turns out — a military targeting system. Enjoy your Pokéballs.

Starting around 2020, Niantic rolled out "AR Mapping tasks" — later branded as Powered-Up PokéStops — where players could scan real-world locations with their cameras in exchange for in-game rewards. Totally optional. Totally innocuous. Just point your phone at that park bench or gym entrance and collect your bonus items.

Except what you were really doing was feeding a machine. Over the years, players collectively contributed an estimated 30 billion scans of the physical world. Niantic fed all of that into something called a Large Geospatial Model — a massive 3D visual map of the world, built from the ground up by people who thought they were just playing a game.

In 2025, Niantic sold Pokémon GO and its other games to Scopely for $3.5 billion. Big number, big headlines. What got a lot less attention was what didn't get sold: the data. The AR division spun off as Niantic Spatial and kept every scan, every map, every frame of footage players had ever submitted.

The game moved on. The data stayed.

This is where it gets genuinely unsettling. Niantic Spatial announced a partnership with a company called Vantor — formerly Maxar Intelligence, rebranded in October 2025. Vantor isn't a tech startup. It's a prime contractor to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency with a $70 million government contract serving over 400,000 U.S. government users. These are people who do national security imagery for a living.

The pipeline, as reported by DroneXL, is pretty clean when you lay it out: players scanned the real world → Niantic Spatial built a visual positioning system from those scans → that system lets a machine figure out where it is using camera imagery alone, with no GPS required. And that's exactly what you want when you're flying military drones in an environment where GPS is being jammed.

Per PC Gamer, the goal is thousands of devices operating on one coordinate framework in an electronic-warfare-heavy environment. Sit with that for a second. That's the destination of the data you submitted to earn Pokéballs. And if this technology ever ends up guiding something in an active theater? We'll almost certainly never know. That's how classification works.

Now here's where the familiar Big Tech playbook kicks in. Niantic will tell you — and they're technically not wrong — that AR scanning was optional, and that the Terms of Service disclosed scans could be used to improve mapping and positioning technologies.

Sure. But there's a canyon between "improve the game experience" and "help navigate autonomous systems in GPS-denied military environments." The fact that it's technically disclosed doesn't mean anyone meaningfully consented. How many 12-year-olds scanning their local park in 2022 understood they might be contributing to a geospatial AI model that ends up in a defense contractor's hands four years later? How many adults did, for that matter?

And it gets weirder. A senior Niantic Spatial executive has reportedly expressed interest in collecting more indoor imagery. People already scanned inside their homes for in-game bonuses without a second thought. That's not a hypothetical privacy risk — that's a pipeline they're actively trying to build.

When Dutch newspaper Trouw first broke this story, Niantic Spatial responded via IGN and Game Developer with a statement saying the raw scan data was never shared with Vantor and that "sharing this data is not part of the agreement." They also noted that AR scanning was shut down as part of the Scopely transition.

And while we're at it — Pokémon GO wasn't even the only game in town. Sidewalk delivery company Coco Robotics, which uses Niantic Spatial's technology to navigate its robots, confirmed that player scans were used to train an early version of the model powering their fleet. Military drones and delivery robots. Your afternoon walk was doing a lot of heavy lifting.

I'll take Niantic at their word on the technicality — but that's probably exactly what it is, a technicality. What most likely happened is that Niantic cleaned the data before training: strip the faces, pull the license plates, scrub whatever obvious PII would trigger GDPR fines or bury them in class action lawsuits. Call it anonymized, check the compliance box, move on. Smart legal hygiene. But here's what that cleanup doesn't change — the geospatial value that makes this model useful for military drone navigation isn't in anyone's face or name. It's in the spatial geometry of the real world that those 30 billion scans captured, and that survives any anonymization pass completely intact.

And here's the tell: if that spatial data had been degraded or scrubbed out in any meaningful way, this deal never happens. Sure, demo gremlins happen and there's the occasional one-off that sneaks through on a good day. But military and intelligence contracting works a lot like climbing the corporate ladder or landing a big enterprise deal — you get very few shots before they decide you don't have the goods and move on. What most likely happened is that someone in Vantor's business development looked at what Niantic Spatial had built and thought "we do GPS-denied navigation, they have the world's largest ground-level spatial dataset — someone will pay serious money for that combination." Good enough to get in the room, good enough to see a path to something real, good enough to write a check. The deal tells you everything you need to know about the data.

Vantor's own response didn't exactly clear things up either. The company refused to say whether the model being deployed was trained on player data at an earlier stage. Saying you won't share the data going forward is not the same as saying the model doesn't already contain it. Once data trains a model you can't pull it back out — which also conveniently makes any denial unfalsifiable.

Before anyone comes at me in the comments: Niantic is not Nintendo, and this distinction actually matters here.

Niantic started as an internal startup inside Google, spun out as its own independent company in 2015. Nintendo, The Pokémon Company, and Google all kicked in early investment money — but that made them investors and IP licensors, not the same entity. The Pokémon Company itself is a separate joint venture between Nintendo, Game Freak, and Creatures Inc. Niantic licensed the Pokémon name and characters to build the game.

Which means Nintendo and The Pokémon Company had absolutely nothing to do with Niantic Spatial's decision to partner with a defense contractor. Their brand is now publicly associated with military drone training data and as far as I can tell nobody has asked them how they feel about it. I'd imagine they're not thrilled.

This is exactly the pattern I keep documenting in this series. They built something we genuinely wanted — in this case, a legitimately fun game that got people moving and outside — got us hooked, extracted what they actually needed, and then quietly monetized it in ways we never would have agreed to if they'd just asked upfront.

Google did it with search. Meta did it with social graphs. And Niantic did it by turning your afternoon walk into a military reconnaissance dataset.

You weren't playing a game. You were working. You just didn't know it.

Gotta catch 'em all — every scan, every street corner, every park, every living room. Thirty billion of them. For the war machine.