The military contractor (Vantar/Maxar) in question basically admits so but just "reserves the right" to use the data which is the political battle line ala Claude and DoD.

This is mostly an ideological battle.

I was interviewed for the Trouw piece and briefly quoted. This isn't to detract from the DroneXL piece, which adds its own angle.

There is a level of evilness on that difficult to grasp. What kind of society puts that burthen on their own children?

Inequality has given power to the few deranged and depraved. No ethics, no morality, just self gratification and excess.

Governments have a say on to whom their weapons manufacturers sell weapons. It should be ditto for geospatial intelligence. If you want to map geospatial data in the Netherlands, you get a license from them and store the data locally and have to get permission to exfiltrate.

This won’t stop exfiltration, of course. But it should slow it down, which in the world of geospatial intel, could mean the difference between a drone finding its target and getting lost because of new construction.

A story was manufactured about arresting a 22 y.o. guy in the Church on Blood in Honour of All Saints for playing Pokemon Go.

The story went hyper-hyped for weeks, with general public sentiment that once such an obscurant retrograde declares such an innocent game so evil, it must be something to absolutely install and play in spite!

And such was the way of the Pokemon Go's viral success in Russia.

(edits for factual precision)

But the value in that data is in the liveliness right, so at some point, would it not make sense for that data to be considered a public asset?

Why do we not demand this data be released regularly (given that the inverse tech could be developed using this as well)? If it can be used to train things used for war, could it not equally be used to train better lifesaving tech (in which case, the data should be made available to the public)?

Hanke formed Niantic Labs inside Google in 2010, then spun it out in 2015.

Spyware company spawns a new spyware company.

In the latest season they've gotten rid of the scan rewards, so I guess they got all the data they needed.

I am conflicted on this report.

1) VPS is not new, the startup I worked at had a working public system in 2018.

2) The hard part about VPSs is not actually the navigation, its generating and querying the map.

How does the VPS work?

You build a point cloud of features (for us we paid people to go and record videos in cities, Tesla/Waymo/toyata/google drove cars niantic got it's players to take videos/pictures)

Align that point cloud to the 3d world, store it in a way that can be queried quickly (doing that quickly and at scale is still an area of research)

Then your client needs to extract the keypoints from an image and perform triangulation against the map to see where the camera was taken (There are calibration issues, but we ain't got time for that)

Now.

Niantic, from what I can see (and its been a while) has a database of key landmarks, but not of the areas inbetween. For decent navigation I would say that this is a massive problem.

I know niantic are pushing the whole "spatial world model" but frankly I don't think that scales. They stuff they have released is memorybound in vGPUs which isn't that useful for realtime querying.

I strongly suspect that actually they have a different system, much more traditional along the lines of colmap, or hloc, or something with a feedforward model in it.

However for the drone usercase, what you actually want is SLAM, which is a very different problem. for SLAM you need to build the map whilst your are moving, and then try and do loop closure or some other method to stop drift. Once you've gone there and back you can use that model for relocaliosation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Go#/media/File:Po...

Wartime propaganda poster: "Loose Surveillance Capitalism Children's Game Apps Sink Your Own Darn City, to an AI autonomous drone swarm assault that surgically neutralizes whatever the worst people want to neutralize".

AI, please rework that into a catchier slogan, and render it as a printable US WW2 OPSEC poster style PDF, but without storing my prompt and-- Hey, what's that buzzing soun--

and we even have youtube videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiJOHV9rIxU

The principle is already turning up on the other side of the front, where a downed Russian drone was found matching live camera feeds against preloaded terrain imagery rather than trusting a single GPS module.

https://dronexl.co/2025/06/10/russian-ai-drone-nvidia-sony-u...

Anyone who checked the origins of the company knew where this was going to go. Your data for sale.

There were already questions about what they were doing with the data of their prior game in the security and privacy space prior to Pokémon.

Is the geographical data more useful, or are buildings and other structures more important?

Genuinely don't know much in this space.

Pokemon Go does not really incentivises this activity. We get a poffin... Nice to have but does not worth the hassle of scanning and looking stupid on the street.

https://www.avclub.com/iran-becomes-first-country-to-ban-pok...

Really smart decision, in hindsight.

Ah, oh yes, "we all knew it from the start", "they indicated that up front" etc.

Fuck no, everyone was foaming at the mouth how it's just a game and no way in hell an intelligence operation.

P.S. Those who "knew it from the start" yet continued helping Niantic, did you really think that the data will be used for the greater good of the humankind?

And then there are those guys... and they make billions, by giving a flying f*ck about ethics or what so ever. And NO ONE will hold them accountable. NO ONE! Because either they lack the power, or they are bought and in it on the scheme.

I accept that the world is like that. Just like International Law has always been nothing more than an academic exercise, business doesnt care about anyone besides profit. Its fine. Its just sad also...

Jeroen van den Hoven, a professor of ethics and technology at TU Delft

Van den Hoven did not condemn battlefield VPS outright. If it helps Ukraine win a just war against an aggressor, he said, that is a good development. His worry is the system falling into the wrong hands

The professor is quite flexible with his "ethics"

The games went to a Saudi sovereign wealth fund. The map went to defense.

The map went to offense. Nobody needs scans of someone else's country for "defense".

At this point it's a given that any data source that can bring an edge in a conflict is being used for exactly that. Things that film and scan surroundings are the newest addition. When a fleet of cars is taking cm or mm resolution scans of entire cities or even countries the safe assumption is that the data is funneled for intelligence and military purposes.

And what can be done? The comments usually say a big fat nothing.

- Any fool already knew this comments: “shouldn’t be a surprise”

- I guess I should call my representative comments

- Just boycot tech comments

Usually nothing much actionable. Building the Ad/Surveillance/Privacy Invasion society? Very actionable, good pay, many mouths fed and FIRE accomplished by HN posters. There’s even at least one acronym for this life achievement.

Shoutout to digital activists that are doing something. I’m but an armchair complainer on this front.

[1] https://smackernews.com/item/48480840 HN

Thanks for playing. (You got played)

https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/302386307352562

I mean, we have a lot of weird shit going down right now... like AI being used to automate art BEFORE it's being used to automate dangerous and menial jobs, but knowing that people are being killed with help from data generated by millions of kids and young adults playing a fun, cute videogame is just so freaking dark and weird.

We are a very strange species and I don't have a great deal of hope for our future.

It is a shameful use of tech.

People literally traded military intelligence for Pokémon.