{"id":496222,"date":"2026-06-12T15:14:08","date_gmt":"2026-06-12T15:14:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/496222\/"},"modified":"2026-06-12T15:14:08","modified_gmt":"2026-06-12T15:14:08","slug":"pokemon-go-players-unwittingly-contributed-to-tech-with-military-drone-uses","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/496222\/","title":{"rendered":"Pok\u00e9mon Go players unwittingly contributed to tech with military drone uses"},"content":{"rendered":"

Visual positioning systems are not necessarily fraught with ethical problems, even in a military scenario. For example, the Ukrainian military has been deploying battlefield robots<\/a> and drones with their own visual positioning systems<\/a> to survive the prevalence of GPS jamming in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. \u201cIf the Ukrainians can win the just war against aggressor Russia with this, it is a good development,\u201d Van den Hoven told Trouw.<\/p>\n

But the Dutch newspaper also interviewed Floris De Hingh, a longtime Pok\u00e9mon Go player who expressed concern about his gameplay data supporting US military systems. De Hingh specifically described himself as \u201cstrongly opposed to the war Trump is currently waging against Iran<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe training data came from people who thought they were catching Pikachu, under a license most never read, sold up a chain that ends at a sovereign wealth fund and a defense prime,\u201d wrote Haye Kesteloo<\/a>, editor in chief and founder of the news website DroneXL<\/a>. \u201cConsent obtained for a game is not consent for a weapons program, even if the end use turns out to be defensible.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Vantor spokesperson told Ars that the company \u201cis not using any Pok\u00e9mon Go data, nor do we have access to any information from the Pok\u00e9mon Go dataset.\u201d Similarly, Niantic Spatial\u2019s spokesperson said that the agreement between the companies does not include direct sharing of game data.<\/p>\n

But some Pok\u00e9mon Go players, such as De Hingh, will probably be uncomfortable with the idea that their gameplay data helped train Niantic Spatial\u2019s models in the first place\u2014especially when the company\u2019s visual positioning system may be used for military applications. Vantor acknowledged that it is \u201cexploring adapting Niantic Spatial\u2019s ground-based visual positioning system\u201d to work alongside Vantor\u2019s existing \u201cGPS-denied positioning capabilities,\u201d which currently rely on satellite imagery.<\/p>\n

Niantic Spatial told Ars that it has no ongoing access to data from current Pok\u00e9mon Go players<\/a>, because the game license has belonged to video game publisher Scopely since May 2025. But players may still want to stay on top of the game\u2019s Terms of Service agreement and privacy policy to understand how their data is currently being used\u2014or may otherwise be used in the future. It\u2019s a lesson that goes well beyond Pok\u00e9mon Go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Visual positioning systems are not necessarily fraught with ethical problems, even in a military scenario. For example, the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":496223,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[61,60,80,210,211,212],"class_list":["post-496222","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-virtual-reality","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-technology","tag-virtual-reality","tag-virtualreality","tag-vr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496222","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=496222"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496222\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/496223"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=496222"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=496222"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=496222"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}