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Pokémon Go Scans Trained the Navigation Tech for Military Drones
- relyks 5mo agoI stopped scanning pokestops because the effort has outweighed the rewards. A lot of the time, the requests show up as "research tasks" for a point of interest that I quickly passed by and have no interest in returning to, besides the tasks related to taking pictures of your buddy pokemon in augmented reality. Looks like I made the right choice by stopping. They do indicate to you up front that they will use the data, but it's still kind of terrible that you could be indirectly contributing to war efforts. I always assumed the data would be used for large world model training or simulations.
- Utilera 5mo agoThat's what makes this feel so off
- christoph 5mo agoMy 8 year old LOVES Pokemon Go, and we regularly go to a local meet up which is a fascinating microcosm of people of all ages from all walks of life. We’ve met some great people and had some incredible conversations, but I really struggle to see how we can continue in good faith now. I seriously loath, hate & despise everything about this digital panopticon world being constructed around us.
- fragmede 5mo agoThe data isn't guns though. Guns aren't a dual use technology that have a nonviolent purpose. Data is. The same data that trains military drones can also be used to train the robot that will bring food to grandma when she's so old that she can't walk up the stairs anymore.
- newsclues 5mo agoShooting guns for target practice is fun and non violent. Guns feed families and protect people too. They are dual use like all tech from knives to nukes.
- fragmede 5mo agoI bet the targets don't feel like they're non-violent. The animal that was killed for food doesn't think anything, because it's dead. That's pretty violent. Shooting someone that attacking you in defense was necessary, but it's definitely violent. All uses of guns are violent. That's what they do. They make holes in things that didn't have holes in them before. There are uses for them that are justified but they're always violent. This isn't an anti-gun screed, this is a words-mean-things rant. Violence is necessary and justified in various situations, which means guns are necessary and justified in various situations, but if you're going to say they're not violent, I can't agree.
- newsclues 5mo agoYour words are violence. Targets are inanimate objects I’m fine with being violent against them just like I’m fine with farting on my chair! Even if all uses of weapons are violence, sometimes violence is justified. If you disagree happy to violently rob you and disabuse you of your stupid ideas. Opinions of people who lived sheltered lives are so divorced from reality
- vigilantpuma 5mo agoThey literally said, "Violence is necessary and justified in various situations, which means guns are necessary and justified in various situations"
- jstanley 5mo agoIf making holes in things that didn't have holes in them before is a sufficient condition for "violence", does that make drills violent too? Or is that taking words-mean-things too far? Or perhaps can we accept that it is possible to make holes in things without doing violence, and that an object that can make holes in things is not inherently a violent object even though it would be violent if you made holes in things like people or animals, or in property without permission.
- Cthulhu_ 5mo ago> I always assumed the data would be used for large world model training or simulations. That was the initial objective, improving navigation by having people walk slowly on pedestrian accessible locations instead of only the main roads. But once that data is collated, it could go anywhere and you've signed any rights to what happens with it away when you agreed to the Ts & Cs.
- RobotToaster 5mo agoI believe some of the data was added to their scaniverse app. I guess this also explains how they were paying for the free 3d model photogrammetry processing that app does.
- cmg 5mo agoThe closest stop to me is between a dog park and a school - scanning it would have been an awkward situation, to say the least. And as you said, for rewards that aren't worth it. I got used to having that "Scan" task just sitting at the top of my list, never to be touched. But I noticed earlier this week that it's gone - and scanning stops doesn't give a new scan task.
- alpineman 5mo agoTruly dystopian. The Pokémon Company should share the blame for licensing their brand in this way without proper safeguards to prevent the data being used for this, particularly given the background of the Niantic founders
- relyks 5mo agoIndeed, but should we always assume data of any type we generate for services can be used for malicious means?
- alpineman 5mo agoTo an extent, but realistically it wasn't really reasonable to expect a cutesy Pokemon game to be used for this ten years later. If you had told the average Pokemon Go player this ten years ago you would have been called crazy. The Pokemon Company should have done more to protect their brand (I would hope for regulation too on player-generated real world data like this)
- nicce 5mo agoMaybe Nintendo lawyers could show their skin for a good cause at once.
- rich_sasha 5mo agoCan you imagine scanning your house, your school, your playground, thinking you're catching Pikachu, then have a drone hit it based on your own footage? Pretty terrifying.
- superkickstart 5mo agoThe world is so messed up right now that this is not even the least bit surprising. In fact it's on point.
- crnkofe 5mo agoThis is revolting. Given how many kids played and are still playing the game this literally means weaponizing kids playing games. Humanity has been lost somewhere along the way.
- SlightlyLeftPad 5mo agoHumanity hasn’t been lost, it’s been conquered. Enter AI, a new era of soulless wonder. Intelligentia Artificiosa. Ingenium Artificum. — Dreams of Silicon and Sorrow
- fragmede 5mo agoWhat's the AI component here? Pokemon Go dates back to 2016, and there was Ingress before that. Hell, there was Foursquare before Ingress. Strava/similar has leaked military bases' layouts. All of that predates ChatGPT.
- nonick 5mo agoIngress still exists and has a similar scanning mechanism.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Utilera 5mo agoOnce the data has trained a model, it also becomes almost impossible to meaningfully audit or undo
- self_awareness 5mo agoInsane. People literally traded military intelligence for Pokémon.
- Forgeties79 5mo agoIn 2016 this wasn’t obviously happening/common knowledge. Remember to blame the perpetrators, not the victims.
- self_awareness 5mo agoHuh? You still don't know how this works, do you? I mean, you can blame whoever you want, even Pikachu. Neither Niantic nor even one person cares who you blame.
- drysine 5mo agoIn Russia people who warned about it were mocked as paranoid boomers. Today I wonder how many of them were paid or just encouraged to do the mocking.
- anilakar 5mo agoTurns out intelligence gathering is pretty boring routine work, not Bond-esque spy stuff or stakeouts in camo nets and face paint.
- bronlund 5mo agoJust wonderful.
- ai_fry_ur_brain 5mo agoNiantics founder has CIA roots... None of this is surprising. https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/302386307352562 https://www.binance.com/en/square/post/302386307352562
- u8080 5mo agoAFAIR, there is a chain of companies which connects Niantic to govt agencies, they were selling this data to Uncle Sam from the beginning(even before Pokemon GO)
- l23k4 5mo ago> Niantics founder has CIA roots This is not at all an honest way of saying "Niantics founder raised money from In-Q-Tel"
- RobotToaster 5mo agoBeing founded with funding from the CIA's venture capital arm seems tantamount to "CIA roots"
- l23k4 5mo agoYes, it would not be unreasonable to say that funding originating from In-Q-Tel has "CIA roots". If someone claimed to have a CIA background solely on the basis that In-Q-Tel funded their mapping software, they'd be a charlatan. Just as a guy selling toilet paper to the CIA is not necessarily someone embedded in the intelligence community.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> Being founded with funding from the CIA's venture capital arm seems tantamount to "CIA roots" For the company, it’s a stretch but tenable. Saying the “founder has CIA roots” solely because they took an In-Q-Tel cheque is just wrong.
- kaladin-jasnah 5mo agoIsn't Oxide Computer also funded by In-Q-Tel?
- Larrikin 5mo agoI'm glad I always quickly scanned the dirt. At some point I gave up completely when I heard they started banning people for dirt scans. In the latest season they've gotten rid of the scan rewards, so I guess they got all the data they needed.
- wartywhoa23 5mo agoWhere are all the edgelords sending me cuckoo signs and tagging me as conspiracy theorist when I said that it compiles photogrammetry by placing pokemons at areas and angles with low image coverage? 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?
- BoppreH 5mo ago> it compiles photogrammetry by placing pokemons at areas and angles with low image coverage But that's not what happened. The data came from very explicit scanning tasks centered about pokestops, not the AR pokemon capture. I used it once or twice to test it out, and it was a drawn out process where it asks you to slowly orbit the pokestop while filming, then permission to upload the (huge) files. You even had to activate a special "volunteer" account flag to even see these tasks. From TFA: > Since 2021, Pokémon Go has asked players to record short videos of real-world locations, called Pokéstops, to earn extra in-game items. Scanning all the buildings, streets, and trees in a 360-degree sweep was optional, and Niantic asked separately for permission to keep the footage. Granting it meant agreeing to extra terms. I'm sure they used GPS data from the players too, but I still hold that it's unlikely the AR pokemon capture yielded any data to them.
- wartywhoa23 5mo agoWell if such a conspiracy crackhead like me somehow happened to reach ranks of Niantic team, I'd totally make sure that there is a decoy "huge data upload point with explicit consent" to shift focus from covert data channels that slowly transmit all else using some custom image compression, maybe just some very small fraction of original data that by the mass nature of acquisition would mathematically still reconstruct the original data, or the fraction of that data that is enough to build a world model.
- BoppreH 5mo ago
- Ccecil 5mo agoHate to say I called this years ago.... It is a shameful use of tech.
- keketi 5mo agosurprised pikachu face
- lmf4lol 5mo agoAnd here I am, trying to make our product as privacy friendly as possible. Trying to follow GDPR and the AI act. Trying to respect my users.. 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...
- ibizaman 5mo agoKeep the good work! I am betting also on making a product that respects its users.
- vrganj 5mo agoAugust 2016: Iran Becomes First Country to Ban Pokémon GO https://www.avclub.com/iran-becomes-first-country-to-ban-pokemon-go https://www.avclub.com/iran-becomes-first-country-to-ban-pok... Really smart decision, in hindsight.
- sciencejerk 5mo agoThis is what censorship looks like. This is what should get people angry. Not localization changes, but actual government-mandated changes or bans. By censoring the internet, Iran is not protecting its citizens but rather the ruling government. Or maybe sometimes censorship actually DOES protect its citizens?
- frollogaston 5mo agoThat's a funny tantrum. It's barely even censorship cause the game isn't about speech. I can't think of a single reason any country besides the US should've allowed Pokémon Go to operate there, phoning location scans back home.
- mcosta 5mo agoIt is even worse, tax money is used for the military.
- teekert 5mo agoI know it's sarcasm, it's a valid point. We all already contribute to the war efforts of our governments.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Al-Khwarizmi 5mo agoOf our own governments. Which makes sense, under the assumption that having a military is a necessary evil, how else would they be funded? This is about players all over the world contributing scans of their own countries to US military, though.
- freakynit 5mo agoWatch Dogs: Legion
- petterroea 5mo agoThis shouldn't be a surprise. But at this point it feels like if you don't completely avoid participating in digital society, your data will be used against you or groups/countries you support.
- Cthulhu_ 5mo agoMainly if you allow a government and / or corporations to do so, but unfortunately democracy and the like only gives you so much influence on that.
- petterroea 5mo agoSadly non technical people do not see future risk and any warning prediction is a slippery slope fallacy. Yet we now hear the echo of privacy advocates of the 2000s and 2010s saying "I told you so!"
- bodash 5mo agoAgreed. If it's "digital", it will be used for elite power plays, because it's too easy. How else could you mass control/analyse/manipulate millions of people instantly? Digital, digital, digital...
- wartywhoa23 5mo agoAn interesting thing is that in Russia, this military data grab by ostensibly 'our western would-be enemies" was supported by viral advertisement by nobody else but the head of Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill. 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)
- Mikhail_Edoshin 5mo agoApparently that story was manufactured and promoted by someone else, don't you think?
- saretup 5mo agoStreisand effect marketing 4d chess move by Niantic?
- Mikhail_Edoshin 5mo agoI'd say a common sense "cui prodest" inquiry leads to a much simpler answer, but to each his own.
- wartywhoa23 5mo agoI'd like to know that much simpler answer.
- darkwater 5mo agoOr by a three-letters-agency...
- wartywhoa23 5mo agoSure, I don't expect Kirill himself to come up with that, but he was positively used as a notorious talking head, which whatever it says must be understood to the contrary. Like in that case when he blamed the rise of toll roads in Russia - "oh brothers and sisters, shalt we allow taking the toll on what should forever be free in Russia?" - the public reacted in the exact same way - a religious zealot told this, so it must actually be a progressive, sane thing to do the opposite.
- emperorxanu 5mo agoI still feel like this is a perfect example of why we should be asking for our data to be disclosed to the public. If I take a picture of some public point of interest, they end up tagging it with their metadata and selling it, well, that's what I agreed to by not reading 20 pages of T&C's right? 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)?
- johannes1234321 5mo agoIt's quite obvious that data is what pays the game. A lot of data about the players )daily routine, commute to work/school, social circles to other players, etc. which allows to derive Job, wealth, etc.), data about surroundings (where do people actually walk, drive, ... etc.) The story here however I'm not too sure about: Isn't the game mostly played in dense urban areas? - by the time you need military drones there the area will have changed a lot (destruction, fortification, ... and overall be outdated) where I think the civilian drones (delivery, cars, ....) benefit more. While the technology certainly is dual use.
- wartywhoa23 5mo ago> While the technology certainly is dual use. It's dual, but its positive aspects are only unlocked after a sufficient human blood sacrifice is made by its overlords, as is the case with all dual use tech.
- fragmede 5mo agoNo it's not. How does 3D printing; what blood sacrifice happened with 3d printers before they were unleashed upon the world? Hard to prove for encryption, though that one's antediluvian. Drones were around and toys for quite a while before they ever killed anyone.
- tomaytotomato 5mo agoHow useful is spatial data over time, does it decay or age much? Is the geographical data more useful, or are buildings and other structures more important? Genuinely don't know much in this space.
- malux85 5mo agoCompred to what? Datasets at this scale are rare. You're not comparing against another ideal dataset, you're comparing against having nothing.
- johannes1234321 5mo agoThere are so many companies these days doing recording for self driving cars and/or street view like applications. Also sites like Flickr collect huge sets of geo tagged photos, as do companies like Meta where tons of geo tagged images are shared each day via their different outlets. Niantic has the benefit that they can steer "volunteers" to specific points, though.
- sciencejerk 5mo agoMaybe Niantic intentionally steered players towards remote locations only reachable on foot, understanding that this data is more scarce and therefore more valuable?
- miggol 5mo agoIt's the combination of geographical data (maps) linked to its visual representation in the world (footage of structures, roads, landscape features) that is useful. The geographical data already exists in digital maps. And I would expect competent militaries already have maps of enemy territory. It's the second part that was so far missing. This combined set allows the training of AI models that can say, "When my surroundings look like x, that looks like y on a map". So when your drone's GPS gets jammed, it can look at its surroundings, reference its (internal and offline) maps, figure out where it is, and navigate.
- thinkingemote 5mo ago
- wiseowise 5mo agoThis is all for your security! Right? Right…?
- adrianhon 5mo agoThis article is based on reporting from Trouw: https://www.trouw.nl/redactie/PokemonGo/ https://www.trouw.nl/redactie/PokemonGo/ I was interviewed for the Trouw piece and briefly quoted. This isn't to detract from the DroneXL piece, which adds its own angle.
- pietervdvn 5mo agoPlease tell them that 'als Elon Musk zijn starlink uitzet, iedereen de weg kwijt is' incorrect is. GPS is managed by the USA gov and we have our Galileo-alternative
- Zonulet 5mo agoBased on the prose of the DroneXL piece, I think it would be more accurate to say that Claude adds its own angle.
- yanhangyhy 5mo agoi remerber china bans it many years ago... and many people dont understand why.... never trust a USA product! and we even have youtube videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiJOHV9rIxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiJOHV9rIxU
- yieldcrv 5mo agoI don’t think the standing committee is objectively that perceptive But I do appreciate alot about what they are doing and choose to do Reminds me more of a theme park. Yes, a heavy handed corporation runs it and if you have any dissent it won’t go well, but if you don’t choose to focus on that then it will be a joyous place and you have the opportunity to contribute to that energy and be rewarded by something that simulates a free market
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Peanuts99 5mo agoChina has the largest intelligence programme in the world and likely has whole teams of people whose job it is to build this type of data. It's not surprising that they are cagey about it being hoovered up by other countries.
- lapinovski 5mo agoeverything sucks :(
- tamimio 5mo agoYou should assume any camera recording will turn into a model one way or another, if not for gnss denied navigation, it will be on facial recognition or such.
- trhway 5mo agoupon seeing the title i was only wondering - whose drones.
- leni536 5mo agoPokémon being used for war efforts is prime South Park material, too bad they already did that.
- phrotoma 5mo agoA game aimed at children supporting military intelligence is prime cyberpunk material. No doubt fiction beat us to that as well.
- deafpolygon 5mo agoSure did.. it’s called Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card).
- speed_spread 5mo agoAnd before that, The Last Starfighter
- deafpolygon 5mo agoAnd before that: "The book originated as a short story of the same name, published in the August 1977 issue of Analog Science Fiction and Fact."[1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender%27s_Game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ender%27s_Game
- cheschire 5mo agohttps://archive.is/0WxtP https://archive.is/0WxtP
- totetsu 5mo ago[dead]
- deafpolygon 5mo agoComplaints in this thread, yet no one will boycott Nintendo for doing this. Ultimately, they allowed this data to be collected and then sold.
- ccppurcell 5mo agoIf you are looking for something to channel that energy into, you could help improve open street map using streetcomplete: https://streetcomplete.app/ https://streetcomplete.app/
- PetitPrince 5mo agoYes, there other mobile editor that are arguably more featured (EveryDoor, OSM Go, OsmAnd), but StreetComplete has a nice gamification / simplification of UI that makes editing a breeze. MapComplete is a nice alternative if you care about some part of the map that are not easily filterable by StreetComplethttps://mapcomplete.org/ https://mapcomplete.org/
- Cider9986 5mo agoStreetComplete is a top app.
- rjmunro 5mo agoSurely military drones will use OpenStreetMap data? Even the Russians and Iranians can use it for whatever purpose they like.
- SahAssar 5mo agoYes. Just like editing wikipedia will help train models that are used for data classification in north korea or whatever. It's a feature of open data, it's open and usable by anyone.
- dotancohen 5mo ago... for any purpose.
- f4c39012 5mo agoWith attribution
- KaiserPro 5mo agoI worked at a VPS competitor of niantic. 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.
- fragmede 5mo ago(Visual Positioning System)
- vectorphresh 5mo agoI'm not sure they need the in between areas, so long as the landmarks are inclusive of similar features. In fact, they probably only need a high quality 3D scans of primitive features to perform classification (walls, building, intersections, etc). I haven't played recently, so I'm unsure how distinct each landmark is.
- KaiserPro 5mo ago> I'm not sure they need the in between areas, so long as the landmarks are inclusive of similar features. That gets you good navigation around landmarks, but when you go further away, you get less usable feature points, as they are closer together you get more position error/need higher resolution cameras. The intermediate places gives you the precise consistent navigation.
- keybored 5mo agoI keep being negative about Digital Tech in general[1]. But this is worse than my habitual negativity towards D. Tech sans AI (AI is a whole chapter onto itself). 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://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48480840 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48480840
- close04 5mo ago> 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.
- sciencejerk 5mo agoEh, the maps could be used for true domestic defense...but examples of foreign invasions on USA soil are scarce...
- chinathrow 5mo ago> Hanke formed Niantic Labs inside Google in 2010, then spun it out in 2015. Spyware company spawns a new spyware company.
- FridgeSeal 5mo agoSpyware Mitosis?
- pknerd 5mo ago"If something is free, you are the product."
- oceansky 5mo agoNowadays you are the product regardless of how much you are paying. Pokémon Go can be pretty expensive with micro-transactions.
- Frieren 5mo agoKids training drones that will kill other kids. 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.
- nonick 5mo agoOr maybe kill themselves, since most scans are from the cities they live in.
- Frieren 5mo agoShit. I guess that it can always be worse.
- diydsp 5mo agoIn the conservative worldview, competition is fair dinkem, so the setting for these businesses is just. That's how we got here. Also in that worldview, we have the responsibility to defend innocent children. Let's if they can follow their own moral code and outlaw this surveillance to protect our kids.
- tokai 5mo agoSentiment here is blowing this waaay out of proportion. It's not new technology, and its not particularly scary or dystopian.
- saberience 5mo agoThis is one of the most dystopian things I've heard in a long while. 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.
- nephihaha 5mo agoZoom was free for a reason. The audiovisuals harvested during lockdown were used to help produce the fake videos/simulations of humans we are seeing today. Same mentality.
- pj_mukh 5mo agoAs someone who works in this space, the headline is a bit of a stretch. The overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone heavy theaters of war is a tiny sliver (or zero?). 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.
- mjanx123 5mo agoWill the drones at least look like Pikachu?
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago> overlap in the locations of Pokemon Go Player data and any active Drone-driven Theaters of War would be a tiny sliver Is Pokémon Go not played in the Middle East, India, Taiwan, Korea or Japan?
- pj_mukh 5mo agoWhich of those are active theaters of war? Pokemon Go wasn't that big in Iran or Lebanon and even there, there aren't any reports of significant drones deployed there. The only place I can imagine is maybe Ukrainian drones in Russia. Still, not a tonne of data there to be useful (as compared to say Tokyo or New York).
- JumpCrisscross 5mo agoAs I’m thinking about this, I suppose Apple Maps and OpenStreetMap are about as problematic as Niantic’s data.
- tokai 5mo agoYes, and star maps can do the same when its night and clear. This is way over blown.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo agoThere seems to be low-hanging political fruit here. 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.
- mawadev 5mo agoIncredible how Nintendo is okay with this
- neumann 5mo agoThat was the conspiracy story about pokemon go when it first came out! That it will be used by the military!
- WhereIsTheTruth 5mo agoFunny how "conspiracy theorists" were once again right
- drysine 5mo ago>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"
- RedMagicBox 5mo ago[dead]
- timcobb 5mo agoThis is fitting/perfect. Pokemon go is THE archetypical surveillance capitalism app. Be a drone in surveillance capitalism, know that your behavior will be used like this. Drones generally don't know or care though. Drones just have fun with tech yay fun awesome. Pokemon, gotta catch them all!!
- wvh 5mo agoThe moral question is if you've unknowingly contributed to war, death and destruction, or if you are actually helping drones to accurately find real targets – which hopefully are not innocent civilians but legitimate military targets.
- pandoro 5mo agoAt this point is there really a difference between death and destruction and "legitimate" military target? It's a slippery slope
- wvh 5mo agoIt is a slippery slope. I'm just hoping that a more surgical drone strike against a weapons factory will create less victims than the blunt force of a ballistic missile aimed "in the general direction of". In a way, technology could enable one party to "outwit" their opponent by taking away the means to wage war without causing random loss of life.
- abroszka33 5mo agoI'm not sure this is a real problem. Google/Apple already has the world mapped out thanks to our photos in the cloud, and we literally let Tesla and others drive cars everywhere recording everything. 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.
- nickdothutton 5mo agoIf I were a (potentially) hostile foreign power, I'd use a game to enlist people in the target country to record sensitive locations.
- pandoro 5mo agoThe depravity of using a fun, uplifting game that targets kids and teenagers to train military drones boggles my mind. "The end justifies the means" continues to reign supreme
- mystraline 5mo ago"Gotta... Kill em all?"
- aussieguy1234 5mo agoWhose to say that this wasn't the plan all along?
- taneq 5mo agoI’m so torn between naked admiration for the sheer Machiavellian audacity of this play, and discomfort with how vulnerable everyone is to this kind of creative abuse.
- nephihaha 5mo agoMuch like Skype and Zoom were quietly used to train up fake versions of human beings.
- teiji-tango 5mo ago[flagged]
- sciencejerk 5mo agoRussia is already taking advantage of preloaded terrain imagery, according to the article: 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-ukraine/ https://dronexl.co/2025/06/10/russian-ai-drone-nvidia-sony-u...
- random_ind_dude 5mo agoReminds me of that sci-fi short film where kids are playing a VR game controlling virtual avatars looking for and shooting virtual enemies, while in the real world, unbeknownst to them, they are actually piloting robots that are hunting down and killing dissidents.
- djmips 5mo agoa dark update of ender's game
- frollogaston 5mo agoI thought that was just Ender's Game
- lbcadden3 5mo agoOne of the reasons I stopped playing Pokémon GO. 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.
- jayd16 5mo ago"We shouldn't have maps because you can use them in war." seems like a wrong way to look at this problem.
- sevenzero 5mo agoWell game vendors catering game data to the military is the problem here, not the maps themselves. Maps are good, shady corpo bs isn't. Same shit Spotify pulled by investing into war machinery rather than paying the artists more.
- jayd16 5mo agoWhat is the difference, in your mind, between mapping data and what was shared?
- rvz 5mo agoTo those who were playing Pokemon Go ten years ago. Thanks for playing. (You got played)
- neilv 5mo agoIf the article's description evoked applications like old missile guidance system methods based on geographic features... this Wikipedia screenshot's imagery looks like it would also be good for precision drone attacks against urban small civilian structures and select individuals within/around them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Go#/media/File:Pok%C3%A9mon_Go_AR_Mode,_Dec_2017.png 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--
- iwontberude 5mo agoThese fools are compromised by nation states and the data isn’t just in their hands. This is why you shouldn’t collect certain types of data.
- iwontberude 5mo agoNvidia wants to create a digital twin of the real world that military can use to plan their next military operations. All of those scans of cities and inside buildings will be a virtual world where war makers can plan to a very fine detail how their drones will behave.
- barkingcat 5mo agoclassic use case for gamification. every time I see any startup run "games" on some aspect of daily life, it's going to go into killer robots in the end.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- junglistguy 5mo ago[dead]
- slvnx 5mo agoIt’s almost impossible to read the article with all those ads. Is this what the web has become?
- FrustratedMonky 5mo agoGotta Kill Them All https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48476214 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48476214 Fully autonomous drones have killed human soldiers for the first time (newscientist.com)
- Avery29 5mo agoWorking in data collection, what stands out isn't the "military" part — it's how routine this kind of repurposing is.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- maxjackson92 5mo ago[dead]