Post
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
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5:58 PM · Jun 11, 2026
Here's the full article for those interested. Insanely bleak stuff, I don't think I'll ever be able to look at the Pokemon franchise the same way again
dronexl.co/2026/06/09/p...
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.
But I'm also glad I quit Pokemon Go after that acquisition out of concern something like this could happen (along with Scopely having a legacy of digital whaling).
Yep, me too. I haven't played Pokemon Go since I heard that Niantic was bought by the Saudi Crime Family. Evil shit, using children and adults having fun together to fuck up the world
Ingress was not included in the sale though, Niantic still owns that (Niantic sold most of their games, but still exists).
Ingress is run by Niantic Spatial, who are the company referenced in the original post. If you boot the app that's the company logo that comes up.
"Pokemon Go blow up a school."
I never trusted this crap. Even back when it was "Ingress" or whatever the vibes were incredibly bad. Anything asking you to trade your GPS and camera for imaginary points should give you the creeps.
The data from these projects being used for *something* was already known info in some way, there might have been articles at the time. Just not with this specific use x_x …should have been viewed as inevitable, yeah.
I've been wary of this ever since Niantic sold out to the Saudi government to be honest, whenever something like that happens nothing good ever comes from it. This just makes the EA buyout even more concerning than it already was.
It makes me think anything the Saudis buy is meant to be turned into "how to kill dissidents"
Either how to kill dissidents, or how to make people love you despite your killing of dissidents
Ive been poisoning this data for years by GPS spoofing and scanning random garbage. I didnt realize I was actually doing something good I just hated Niantic
Those screenshots again with alt text. Thanks for sharing the story :)
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a lot of people in this thread saying "this has been known for years"......No, the 'selling the data for use in weapons manufacturing' part has not been known.
Also people saying 'seling it to Saudis was the problem' - but these are US weapons manufacturers, not Saudi (tho US can sell to them ofc)
plus - Niantic only sold Niantic Games to Scopely, not the Spatial division, which I would assume already have plenty enough data, and was already well down the road of develoment by the Scopely sale. Hence, no need to keep the AR scans in PoGo any more.
ever since they stole the finnish game studio grey matter's shadow cities with ingress and hiding behind google's back, thus killing the game year later, i always been very untrustworthy of niantic, and I've been untrustworthy of google how they collect data and free labor from users
also i cant type apparently just pretend i wrote all of that correctly alright great <3
Shared then unshared because of the fake alt text. Just copy paste the text where you found it originally, you don't have to retype it...
Their phone will find the text and copy it in one click even from the screenshot. What a dweeb.
I believe MatPat did a video when Go came out where it detailed that their “stops” and “gyms” were originally part of a surveillance game created by Niantic. Kinda felt obvious where the game was going after that.
They were submitted by Ingress players like me, yeah. Data from Ingress players' movements was used to fine tune Google Maps' walking directions in the early days.
This development is not great, but I guess anything improving computer vision software will be used for war.
People in the community early on were always talking about this. When they removed all the COVID ease of use bonuses it made people realize that we were the product and they cared more about getting a map of the world out of us than making a good game. It was a big reason that a lot of people quit
1990's Tech Ethos: Do No Evil.
2000's Tech Ethos: Move fast and break things.
2020's Tech Ethos: Nothing pure and good shall go uncorrupted.
This is why you get a scan research task and leave it as your uncompleted top so the three beneath it are all not scans
I'm not one to lecture people about using alt text, but just FYI if you can't copy text directly from the source website, most OSes let you copy text directly from screenshots.
Mad story tho!
I feel like we knew something about this years ago, or am I more delulu than I thought?
It's no secret that it was being used for 3D mapping data.
But I think we all hoped that information would be used for self-driving cars, not self-driving missiles.
Me in 2022 telling fellow trainers uploading videos could be sold to the government
Hasn't this been known for years? I remember a report coming out in like 2023, because I specifically quit over it.
the idea of using this to create a map of the world that can let tech figure out where you are based on a visual map is cool in theory for actual GPS navigation in areas with no signal but nooooo we have to use it to bomb people instead fuck this world
Good grief. People with sense were well aware of the Ingress software endgame practically since it debuted.
If I remember correct, pretty much predicted this back in 2016.
I played anyway. Regretfully.
Yeah that post is somewhere in my old Twitter account. Wasn’t hard to see coming :/
Everybody saying that this only happened because of the sale to the Saudis is wrong, Niantic Spatial is still an independent American company.
yup
the involvement of the Saudis is just another poisoned cherry on top of this festering sewage cake
*knowingly
Niantic was quite clear about how they made money from their free game
I mean ... their CIA connection has been known since forever. bsky.app/profile/lady...
Your Cyberpunk Future
@lady8jane.bsky.social
· 14h
This has indeed been known. There are articles about this at least as far back as 2016. www.networkworld.com/article/9536...
some of these people here dont seem to understand that most of the population doesnt know everything about everything all the time, and definitely dont know about this
I never did any of the photos/3D scanning shit because it never sat right with me, so at least my instincts were good. But Jesus h Christ I hate this so much 🙃
To be fair, a lot of people were warning of exactly this in 2016 and I recall there being a massive online backlash against them for "promoting crazy conspiracy theories".
It's worth keeping in mind for the future.
They didn't exactly bury this lead. The company was doing this much more explicitly in a separate business model before they launched go. Not saying this is good. It is not. It's just that a lot of folks ignored clear warnings for us to get here.
This is why I never played that game and I wondered if I was being crazy no apparently not
This is the kind of stuff that would be dismissed as unrealistic in a sci-fi story, yet here we are
Actually I think a lot of Pokémon go players knew that something like this was going on. I quit playing a few years ago when they raised prices, and multiple people told me to delete the app as well because the data they get from players is just as valuable as any purchases
This is the most dystopian thing I have read this month, and that’s saying a lot these days.
Scan? Oh I tossed those quests every time. I'm walking or driving by, I'm not going back for that.
We had an idea something like this was happening, i personally have never done the scanning. Ever. Didnt trust who or why.
I remember trying a VPN to spoof different locations. The robots are going to be surprised when Times Square doesn’t remotely resemble my kitchen.
That's actually useful to them, too! When you've got a million images of Times Square and a hundred that aren't, it's easy to separate them out as statistical outliers, and then they serve as useful training material to identify what "not Times Square" looks like.
I could've sworn the military use of the spatial data was already known in 2019. When I read this I legitimately thought it was old news.
The feature was disabled at least a week before the article posted.
I’m not saying this is good. I’m saying it’s a really big omission and makes me doubt the other parts of the article.
This was a large topic of conversation when I was in grad school for technology design.
We knew this back in 2016, this isn't new information.
I have to constantly listen to my family talk about Pokémon Go and I haven't had the heart to tell them this is why I say no when they try to get me to play. It makes me so angry. People are having fun and that fun is being LITERALLY weaponized.
That... it's pretty insane alright. I've only been playing it for a few weeks but now I think extra care may be required- not that I do the "go" bit very much anyway, rather just see what spawns right by my house and take it
How did people miss this when Niantic sold all their games to Saudi Arabia?
I somehow assumed this was the whole point of Pokémon Go to begin with 🤔. At some point in my career it helped create indoor 'gps' maps for large events. Walking around with position trackers (aka mobile phones) was exactly what we had to do.
And here I was thinking I MIGHT break my Nintendo boycott seeing as some of the upcoming games for the Switch 2 actually look decent.
This is enough to make me reconsider...
the monkey island $20 rule aged far too well, without even needing to be adjusted for inflation
I was planning on buying my first Nintendo console in like a decade too.
Never spending a cent on Nintendo again now that I know their money is this bloody.
It should be noted this was a deal made by Niantic, which is an independent company, separate from The Pokemon Company and Nintendo.
Though also TPC probably should have done more background checks before signing the deal with Niantic for them to develop Pokemon Go
Niantic really had a massive fall off over the years, insane to see how low they’ve gotten
PG got me away from the computer and out of the house. I've been trying to get back into the habit since the pandemic, and then THIS becomes a thing. What the frell.
This is horrific. I do think it was only naive players who didn't understand that the most important thing about Pokémon Go was the detailed navigation data that you were creating while playing the game. That was always more important than any money that could be spent in the game. Players buying
things in-game was essentially just tip money compared to the data that was collected and then could be sold to someone else. That was always much more valuable.
There is a Charizard in the basement of the Mariupol steelworks
The quality of the scans is abysmal, when Lightship was running you could see what people had scanned and frankly it was garbage.
When Saudi Arabia made an investment in Niantic I quit the game.
I knew there was nothing good happening with all the geospatial data and image capture.
So, like, Butlerian Jihad when?
You’re telling me that the makers of the biggest mobile game ever sold their users’ data to US military contracts *right after a buyout by a Saudi investment firm*? I’m *totally* shocked 😒
2016 Pokemon Go player: oh look a shiny. ✨
2057 Cyberdyne Systems Aerial Hunter Killer: oh look a shiny. 💀💀💀✨💀💀💀
Russias been using gps destroying satellites lately above europe. Coincidence?
💙 this kinda only really applies to poke stop scans which I think a majority of people don’t even do because it’s such a clunky process to do with little incentive to do so. But this is quite a very horrifying thing
even without those there's an enormous amount of data about people's movements
Pretty slick NGL. Operating precision weapons in and through GPS denied environments is one of those challenges that I think can probably most easily be solved by precise vision systems supported by high-resolution maps like this.
My contempt for all things pokemon has finally been vindicated.
It's so crazy that a game on their phones about trapping animals in balls and then forcing them to fight to the death, but made to seem like they're doing this in real life, would be used for nefarious purposes.
I'm as upset at the article as most everyone else and I'm a Pokemon fan that really did not resonate with GO, but this article could also be BS. I don't know, but I'm also pretty sure that Nintendo and GameFreak were not informed about this. Plus, wasn't GO sold to a horrible company?
Pokemon is most often marketed as a harmonious piece of work, where friendship triumphs and unity wins out. I have a feeling they'd end the game's run over this if they could, but it's unfortunately a cash cow that seems bottomless and greed IS a hell of a drug.
On the positive side, there’s pizza!
tech.yahoo.com/ai/meta-ai/a...
I think they said that they would use the scans to make the game more immersive.
I had a feeling they would use it for something else when that never happened, but I would never have guessed Military intelligence..
I deleted the game when it was sold to Saudi Arabia.
The Running Man but it's adults who played Pokemon Go as kids. They are getting targeted by glitching drones accessing wrong database.
Looking back, I'm glad I never got into Pokemon Go...
mq-1 predator drone - i choose you!
use hellfire missile on elementary school!
it's super effective!
Yeah we're just in the "cyberpunk questlines are real" timeline huh
Probably too late but everyone should delete the app immediately and boycott all future Pokémon games
those of us that could put 2 and 2 together knew they were making a database. it's datamining. ...but we didn't know where the data was going.
...on the rare occasion I used AR, I pointed it at the ground or my car interior, for this reason. I intended to not give them useful data.
I hope they get FUCKING buried in litigation.
Makes me glad I never got in on the craze. That is genuinely sickening.
This is a surprise to people?
Bricks and Minifigs having the second worst scandal of the month was not something I expected.
Nice idea, if it wasn't Americans being mapped.
Wrapping myself in aluminum sheeting won't "foil" the search?
So are they going to use this data to like… bomb the United States or something
under this administration? mostly just send ICE squads to target specific dissenters for now
I stopped playing Pokémon Go because the gameplay loop was getting boring and relied to much in MTX. Lol I had no idea about all of this.
What about wordle then. What's the angle for monetization there, I've never been able to quite figure it out
I mean, most people were saying this was going to happen, when the game was released.
The only people saying "no it won't happen" were people in the game press.
They knew, most adults decided not to care
Just like they are right now with AI 😐
I'm still so confused why Korea allowed this game but not Google Maps
i get the impression that korea pols aren't much smarter about this stuff than your typical PoGo player
(which isn't really as disparaging as it sounds, it's just normies vs. a massive corpo media machine actively manipulating them)
Anyone who saw that tech knew in five seconds it was going to be sold to some shitty firm to do crap like this.
They’re using Pokémon GO to train military surveillance/assault drones…
…I’m glad I left PoGo before it started going to hell, but *oh my fuck* I still can’t believe it!
People knew this was data harvesting for a decade and you think it's a surprise.
What if a wave of drones blows up the buildings they use to navigate?
Honestly while I was playing I was like….. naaaah this is totally sus.
Yeah, this has been known. Good to repost it though
And everyone paid for this to happens. Paid for their pokecoins or whatever to allow for this. I take it the other Niantic games also do this.
I knew that AR shit was sus from the get go but holy FUCK
It was pretty obvious that's what it's for. That's why a number of us refused to participate in that feature and tried to warn others to do the same. Not everyone, but people definitely knew.
Ever since their autism speaks event in arizona and ignored public outcry I knew they were scumbags
Welp. Haven't played pokemon go in years anyway
I'm not the least bit surprised by this, and knew these types of things were coming when I still played this year's ago
What in the world??? Do these players know what the hell they are creating?
A wise adage goes “if you’re not paying for the product, you are the product”
As far as I know Niantic Spatial owns and runs Ingress these days, but not Pokemon Go. Where is the original article?
you're not wrong, PoGo is still under Niantic (not Spatial).
but PoGo players' in-game work made the database before the split, and Niantic Spatial took that info with them when they spun off.
now PoGo has removed the ability to AR scan pokestops for a reward.
This has been known for a while now, just didn't have a direct link to what exactly until now
It’s good that this is getting more attention. This has been known for years and I’ve been skeeved out by people who kept playing anyway for a long time now.
seguro q tiene un video de esto. O lo escuché en ?
Nice that many of those kill zones are in densely populated areas. But where else do you send the automated killer drones but against the human resistance?
tbh it was pretty obvious they were doing something like this from the start
So who is calling in an air strike against my local post office?
I hate it when is right because it means it's straight to hell in a handbasket
today in luxury hyper surveillance....
Where are Pokemon Go players located? I know it's pretty global but I'm guessing not in China and Russia, for example.
icon-era.com/blog/pokemon...
Yes but for a brief glorious moment in time some folks were able to play the dumbest game of all time. So it’s not all bad
