Pokemon Go to Train Killer Drones
This is the absolute epitome of 21st century data protection woes.
"This might be one of the most insane scandals in game history: when Pokemon Go players scan PokeStops, theyve been unknowingly building a detailed visual model of the world which is being sold to a military contractor to build a no-GPS positioning for the new generation of unmanned killing machines."
"The pipeline runs from a mobile game to the battlefield in three steps. Players scanned the physical world. Niantic Spatial turned those scans into a 3D map that lets a machine locate itself by sight when satellite signals fail. And in December 2025, Niantic Spatial announced a partnership with Vantor, the defense and intelligence firm formerly known as Maxar Intelligence, to fuse that ground-level system with Vantor’s aerial navigation software for use in GPS-denied operations."
as a followup post notes: "I think contextually it is important that Niantic Games was sold off and acquired by Scopely, who are owned by Savvy Games, which is an investment branch of the Saudi Arabian government. This was a strategic investment to get access to the data by a foreign government with no ethical concerns. I think this should lead to a crisis in faith to Nintendo corporate about the use of information being collected and who they work with, but the same Saudi Arabian government also holds a percentage of stock in Nintendo itself and Niantic Games mints them money. It is a problem from the top down and ethical consumerism becomes more complicated in the world of hyper capitalism."
I would hope that EU data protection rules would have provided any protection against this, but to be honest, with no prospect of genuine enforcement, probably not.
Tags: data-protection data-privacy niantic pokemon-go training gaming vantor drones military scopely murderbots