For nine years, Pokémon Go asked its players to go outside and “catch ‘em all.” Millions of children and their parents walked through their cities with cameras raised. Some, chasing in-game rewards, filmed statues, parks, street corners and, in at least one case, the inside of an apartment. Someone else was gathering the results.

In June, Dutch daily Trouw traced how roughly 30 billion player scans helped train Niantic’s mapping systems. Niantic Spatial has since partnered with Vantor, the rebranded Maxar Intelligence and a major US defense contractor, to develop visual positioning for drones and other platforms in GPS-denied areas.

Vantor serves defense and intelligence clients and provides satellite imagery used widely in western reporting on Ukraine and Gaza.

A game largely played by children had helped build technology now being adapted for US military use.

The game designer and media philosopher Ian Bogost saw the mechanism coming. In 2011 he proposed an honest name for the industry of points, badges and engineered rewards: “exploitationware.” Fifteen years later, Pokémon Go offered a striking example of what he meant.

Langley’s hand in Google Earth

The lineage sits openly on the corporate résumé. John Hanke, founder and executive chairman of Niantic Spatial, spent four years in the US Foreign Service before entering tech. In 2001, he co-founded Keyhole, a mapping startup named after America’s KH spy satellites.

When the company neared bankruptcy, an investment from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital arm, kept it alive. Its technology would be used to “support United States troops in Iraq.” Much of the funding reportedly came from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), which supplies geospatial intelligence to the Pentagon.

Google bought Keyhole in 2004 and turned its Earth Viewer into Google Earth. Hanke went on to run Google’s Geo division, built Niantic as an internal startup and spun it out in 2015 with backing from Google, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company. Pokémon Go arrived a year later.

Cartographers paid in Poké Balls

In 2021, the game began rewarding players for scanning real-world locations. They pointed a camera at a Pokéstop, uploaded the footage, and collected their prize. Participation was optional and limited to a fraction of the user base, yet that fraction produced billions of scans. The game’s terms gave Niantic a transferable, sublicensable license to submitted content, meaning the company could resell it to third parties.

Bogost had already described how this economy worked. Technology firms were “extracting personal information from customers by pretending that one’s product is actually one’s customer.” Pokémon Go followed the same model, rewarding players while using their scans to build its maps.

The scans helped train Niantic’s Visual Positioning System. Where GPS asks a satellite for a location, VPS looks at what a camera sees and matches it against a 3D model of the world. Two recognizable reference points a few pixels wide can be enough to fix a position. The system becomes especially useful when satellite signals are jammed, spoofed, or unavailable.

Floris De Hingh, a Dutch player who downloaded the game on its first day, told Trouw he had scanned everything from public parks to his own living room. “I was just playing a game,” he said, unaware of where those images might eventually lead.

The legal and ethical problem lies in what players agreed to surrender. Niantic said their personal data “[has not] been sold to anyone,” while the uploaded scans were governed separately as user content. A room can expose possessions, habits, and intimate details even when no name appears in the frame. The consent form focused attention on identity while securing broad rights over the surroundings.

Riyadh gets the players, the Pentagon gets the map

In 2025, Niantic split itself in two. Its games and players went to Scopely for $3.5 billion, under Saudi-owned Savvy Games Group. The spatial technology and mapping assets remained with Niantic Spatial. According to Niantic’s announcement, its existing shareholders retained stakes in the new company, while Scopely invested another $50 million. Saudi state capital now had a stake in both companies.

The Vantor agreement followed in December. Its announcement names GPS “unavailability, spoofing, interference, and jamming” as the problem, with autonomous drones among the platforms. Vantor, formerly Maxar Intelligence, is deeply embedded in the US defense and intelligence establishment and serves as a principal contractor for the NGA’s geospatial intelligence system, which reaches more than 400,000 US government users.

The firms plan to combine Niantic’s ground-based VPS with Vantor’s aerial positioning software, allowing air and ground systems to share coordinates without satellite signals. Vantor is also deeply embedded in the US defense and intelligence establishment.

The NGA helped keep Keyhole alive in 2003. More than two decades later, one of its principal contractors is working with Niantic Spatial on technology built in part from billions of scans supplied free by players.

Mapping everywhere, restricting Palestine

For more than two decades, the Kyl-Bingaman Amendment restricted the resolution of US-licensed commercial satellite imagery over Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories to two meters.

The Commerce Department eased the limit to 40 centimeters in 2020, but the country-specific restriction remains in US law. It long left evidence of occupation and destruction coarse on widely used imagery, even as commercial mapping systems gathered street-level detail elsewhere.

Children were encouraged to record the world at pavement level, while Washington imposed a special legal limit around the occupation state. US companies gathered ever more detail from ordinary users, but the law continued to restrict what could be seen over occupied Palestine.

The model survives the denial

The companies insist no game data is going into drones. Vantor told Trouw it will not use the Pokémon Go scans, then declined to confirm or deny whether its models had already been trained on them. Niantic Spatial had answered that question months earlier, when a spokesperson admitted the scans trained an “early version” of the very model on which the system is built. The raw imagery may stay out of Vantor’s hands, but its role in the model’s development cannot be neatly removed.

Jeroen van den Hoven, professor of ethics and technology at TU Delft, told Trouw why that distinction resists auditing. Once training data has been absorbed, individual contributions dissolve into patterns that cannot be traced or revoked. Van den Hoven said that “the people who thought they were playing a game have clearly been fooled.”

Bogost coined exploitationware for a swindle that exchanged badges for behavior, years before phone cameras were mapping playgrounds and living rooms for corporate AI. Pokémon Go extended that bargain across the physical world and carried the resulting technology into a military supply chain. The game told its players to catch ’em all. Its owners gathered far more.

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Via https://thecradle.co/articles/gotta-scan-em-all-how-pokemon-go-turned-its-players-into-pentagon-cartographers