So there’s a story making the rounds right now that’s still being fact-checked in real time, but its starting to hit the news cycle and its worth talking about. The short version: the data collected by Pokemon Go is now being used to train AI models that could assist military drones in urban warfare situations.
Yeah. Let that sit for a second.
If you’re not familiar with Pokemon Go, it was this massive augmented reality mobile game that blew up around 2016-2017. You’d walk around in the real world with your phone and catch virtual Pokemon that were overlaid on your actual surroundings using the camera. It was insanely popular. People were walking into traffic, trespassing on private property, showing up to parks at 2am — all to catch a rare Pokemon. There was even a resurgance when new Pokemon games came out and people who had quit would download it again for a little while.
The game was made by a company called Niantic. And what Niantic was really doing this whole time — the whole Pokemon thing was kind of secondary — was harvesting data. Absolutely massive amounts of it.
What Kind of Data Are We Talking About?
Think about Google Street View. It drives cars around and photographs streets from a specific angle, at a specific time, from a specific height. It’s useful but its limited. Pokemon Go players were going everywhere. Inside apartments, into churches, into backyards, down alleyways that no Street View car would ever go down. They were capturing environments from ground level, from multiple angles, in real time, in places that no conventional mapping tool had access to.
You’re in your bathroom. You’re in your church. You’re in the parking garage of your office building. You’ve got your phone out and your capturing angles of real world spaces that have never been photographed before at that level of detail. And all of that was being collected.
Niantic eventually sold Pokemon Go to another company and then pivoted their whole operation to use those data harvesting assets to build and sell data to power AI models. That was apparently the long game the whole time. The Pokemon IP was just a viral delivery mechanism to get millions of people to voluntarily map the entire physical world from ground level.
Now there are reports that this data — specifically the residential zones, urban streets, building interiors and exteriors — is being sold to defense contractors to make drones smarter in urban warfare environments. Training AI on how to navigate cities, identify structures, move through tight spaces. The kind of stuff that would make autonomous military drones significantly more capable.
It Gets Worse
There’s also a book called The Age of Surveillance Capitalism that made some claims about Pokemon Go specifically that are worth bringing up. According to the book, there’s evidence that Niantic had deals with certain businesses where they would strategically place Pokemon near specific locations to literally lure players to those spots. Certain restaurants, certain stores — they would put a rare Pokemon nearby and drive foot traffic there.
So its not just that data is being collected to predict your behavior. The app was actively being used to manipulate your behavior in real time. Get you to go where they want you to go. Thats a different thing entirely.
Its kind of like when you’re scrolling Instagram and you see an ad for something you were just thinking about. A lot of people assume their phone is listening to them. It’s probably not actually recording conversations — what’s actually happening is more unsettling. You’ve been fed content designed to make you want something, and then you get shown the ad for it. Your behavior is being shaped before the ad even appears. The ad is just the final step.
Why This Should Bother You
The Pokemon Go thing is a pretty clean example of how this works at scale. Build something people love, make it free, collect everything they generate while using it, and then figure out what to sell it for later. The users are the product. They always have been.
The idea that this data pipeline eventually ends up powering military drones in urban warfare scenarios is the part that feels like a jump, but apparently it’s not. Its the kind of long game that most people wouldn’t have imagined when they were chasing Pikachu around a park in 2016.
Probably worth thinking about the next time you download a free app.
