I'm Helping The (Future) War Effort!

'What did you do in the war, lady?' 

'I caught a lot of Pidgeys. Oh and trained the drones that beat the Islamic army back!'

An AI model trained on data collected from users of Pokémon Go will potentially help military drones find their location in war zones. Pokémon Go, a 2016 augmented reality mobile game, allowed players to find and catch Pokémon in the real world using the cameras on their mobile phones, and exploded in popularity. In 2018, the company reported having more than 800m downloads worldwide. A 2021 update to the game introduced Pokéstops, which gave players in-game rewards for scanning real locations using their devices. It required users to opt in and upload the recording. Niantic, which created Pokémon in partnership with Nintendo, collected users’ location scan data before the company sold its gaming division in 2025.

And people are concerned about it, because of course they are!  

Tom Sulston, head of policy for tech policy think tank Digital Rights Watch said the use of civilian data for military ends was troubling.“While they may have disclaimers in their Ts&Cs, we know that most people don’t read vast legal documents when they want to play a video game,” he said. “We need regulators to focus on ‘best interests of the user’ or ‘fair and reasonable’ tests to keep users safe from exploitation like this.

Exploitation? 

Here, mate, look that up and use it properly next time!