Pokémon Go players unwittingly contributed to tech with military drone uses

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 and drones with their own visual positioning systems to survive the prevalence of GPS jamming in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. “If the Ukrainians can win the just war against aggressor Russia with this, it is a good development,” Van den Hoven told Trouw.

But the Dutch newspaper also interviewed Floris De Hingh, a longtime Pokémon Go player who expressed concern about his gameplay data supporting US military systems. De Hingh specifically described himself as “strongly opposed to the war Trump is currently waging against Iran.”

“The 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,” wrote Haye Kesteloo, editor in chief and founder of the news website DroneXL. “Consent obtained for a game is not consent for a weapons program, even if the end use turns out to be defensible.”

A Vantor spokesperson told Ars that the company “is not using any Pokémon Go data, nor do we have access to any information from the Pokémon Go dataset.” Similarly, Niantic Spatial’s spokesperson said that the agreement between the companies does not include direct sharing of game data.

But some Pokémon Go players, such as De Hingh, will probably be uncomfortable with the idea that their gameplay data helped train Niantic Spatial’s models in the first place—especially when the company’s visual positioning system may be used for military applications. Vantor acknowledged that it is “exploring adapting Niantic Spatial’s ground-based visual positioning system” to work alongside Vantor’s existing “GPS-denied positioning capabilities,” which currently rely on satellite imagery.

Niantic Spatial told Ars that it has no ongoing access to data from current Pokémon Go players, 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’s Terms of Service agreement and privacy policy to understand how their data is currently being used—or may otherwise be used in the future. It’s a lesson that goes well beyond Pokémon Go.