By Movieguide® Staff
Hundreds of millions of Pokémon Go players spent years recording their surroundings in exchange for in-game rewards, never imagining those clips would outlive the game itself.
When Dutch player Floris De Hingh learned what had become of his footage, he told investigators: “I was just playing a game.”
That game has a second life. According to a report by Dutch publication Trouw, compiled and translated by drone industry outlet DroneXL, roughly 30 billion environmental scans collected through Pokémon Go helped train a Visual Positioning System, or VPS, now being readied for deployment in US military drones and robots. De Hingh, a player since launch day in 2016, had even scanned the inside of his own apartment.
Since 2021, Pokémon Go has rewarded players with extra in-game items for filming real-world locations like local PokéStops. Players who opted in agreed to a separate set of terms granting Niantic a transferable, sublicensable license to the footage — meaning the company could legally resell it to third parties. Most players did not know that was the arrangement.
Those scans became the raw material for a camera-based navigation model that orients a device by matching what its camera sees against a 3D map of the world — no satellite signal required. In December 2025, Niantic Spatial — the company that split from Niantic’s games division after Pokémon Go sold to Saudi-owned Scopely for $3.5 billion — announced a partnership with Vantor, formerly Maxar Intelligence, to deploy the system in military drones and robots for GPS-denied operations.
Pokemon Go Players Who Recorded Videos For Niantic Have “Indirectly” Trained Military Drones, It’s Claimed https://t.co/RJ3McKn6Ca pic.twitter.com/2iiiA2gYLA
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— TheGamer (@thegamerwebsite) June 12, 2026
Vantor is no bystander in the defense world. The firm holds a $70 million contract with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and serves more than 400,000 US government users. When Dutch journalists asked whether its military system relies on Pokémon Go scans, Vantor denied using the data directly — then declined to confirm whether the model it plans to field had already been trained on those scans.
Niantic Spatial offered its own careful hedge. A spokesperson told Kotaku that Pokémon Go scans trained an “early version” of its navigation model, but said data-sharing has since stopped.
“While we have an agreement with Vantor, announced last December, it is still in its very early stages, and sharing this data is not part of the agreement,” the spokesperson said. Since the Scopely acquisition closed, the company added, Pokémon Go data is no longer shared with Niantic Spatial at all.
Not everyone takes that at face value. Jeroen van den Hoven, professor of ethics and technology at Delft University of Technology, said the connection between player scans and military navigation is hard to dismiss.
“Without the huge number of scans from all those gamers, the development of this system would never have progressed so quickly,” van den Hoven told Trouw. He acknowledged the technology could legitimately benefit Ukraine in a just war — his concern is who else gets hold of it, and whether players who built the training dataset ever had a fair shot at understanding what they were agreeing to.
The roots of this story run deeper than the game itself. Niantic grew out of Keyhole, a mapping company that took funding from In-Q-Tel — the CIA’s venture arm — in 2003 and whose technology supported US troops in Iraq. Iris Muis, a data-ethics researcher at Utrecht University’s Data School, put the structural problem plainly: a user cannot picture how their data might be used five years down the line, in an application they’d fundamentally disagree with.
For Christians thinking carefully about technology — about truth, dignity and what it means to treat people as more than data points — this case lands with quiet weight. The terms were legal. The consent was technically obtained. De Hingh had the last word on it: “A game should stay a game.”
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