Happy 10th anniversary, Pokémon Go players! What a joy the game has been, huh?
Who can forget those wonderful summer days in 2016 when seemingly everyone was out and about catching Pokémon on their smart phones? And the countless raids and memories since.
Oh, we’ve all been training military drones each time we scanned a Pokéstop, by the way.
According to a report from Dutch outlet Trouw via DroneXL, hidden in those terms and conditions was a little note about how the game’s developer, Niantic, was keeping our 360-degree videos of Pokéstops. And agreeing to terms to play the game also granted the company “a transferable, sublicensable license to the scans” that it could use to sell footage to third parties.
That third party now in question is Vantor, a defense intelligence company formerly known as Maxar Intelligence, that Niantic announced a partnership with this past December.
According to the reports, 30 billion scans in the game “became the raw material for a Visual Positioning System, or VPS,” which is a system that “works out where a camera is by matching what it sees against a detailed 3D model of the world.” In theory, VPS strengthens the capabilities of drones in areas where they could otherwise be blocked out by interference, like in warzones where jammers are often deployed.
“Where GPS depends on a satellite signal, VPS works out where a camera is by matching what it sees against a detailed 3D model of the world,” DroneXL explained. “Two recognizable reference points a few pixels wide can be enough to fix a location.”
When asked by Trouw, Vantor denied that it would use data from Pokémon Go, but was “unwilling to say whether that also means that the model the defense company is going to deploy has not been trained with that data.” That’s not a very positive sign.
“Without the large number of scans from all those gamers, the development of this system would never have progressed so quickly,” Jeroen van den Hoven, Professor of Ethics and Technology at TU Delft, said to Trouw. “The players have indirectly contributed to military applications, in a perhaps minimal but nonetheless effective way.”
I don’t really even know what to say anymore. I haven’t played Pokémon Go in a long time and barely (if ever) used the scan function, but I just uninstalled the app from my phone. It feels too little, too late, and this whole thing makes my stomach turn.
It’s hard not to feel like we are all pawns in a larger, sinister game, even when it comes to an assumedly innocent pastime like Pokémon.
