Released in 2016, Pokemon Go quickly became a worldwide phenomenon. Even folks who weren’t traditionally interested in the monster-taming franchise were wandering around with their smartphones out, on the hunt for virtual creatures that would appear via augmented reality. Although the number of active users has dropped over the years, it’s estimated that more than 50 million users currently log in and play every month.
From a gameplay standpoint, Go is brilliant. Although the Pokemon that players seek out obviously aren’t real, searching for them closely approximates the in-game experience that the franchise has been known for since its introduction on the Game Boy back in 1996.
But now, instead of moving a character through a virtual landscape in search of the elusive “pocket monsters”, players find them dotted throughout the real world. To be successful, players need to leave their homes and travel to where the Pokemon are physically located — which often happens to be a high-traffic area or other point of interest.
As a game, it’s hard to imagine Pokemon Go being a bigger success. At the peak of its popularity, throngs of players were literally causing traffic jams as they roamed the streets in search of invisible creatures. But what players may not have realized as they scanned the world around them through the game was that they were helping developer Niantic build something even more valuable.
The Imaginary Gig Economy
The game has used augmented reality (AR) to bring the world of Pokemon to life since day one, but it wasn’t until the fall of 2020 that Niantic introduced AR Mapping. With this new feature, players could scan real-world locations and objects by walking around them while the software captured images from their smartphone’s camera. This was presented to the player as “Field Research”, and once completed, it would unlock various rewards in the game.
For those with a technical mindset, the implications of this are immediately obvious. Through the Research system, Niantic could direct Pokemon Go players anywhere they wished. Once the imagery from these Research scans were uploaded, they could be used to create detailed 3D models through the use of photogrammetry. The more players that perform Field Research on a particular location, the more accurate the results.
If Niantic wanted to create a 3D model of a statue in a park or the front of a building, they simply needed to assign it a Field Research task and the players would rush out to collect the data. Forget Google’s Street View — rather than sending a camera-laden car out once every year or so to grab new images, Niantic could sit back while millions of players uploaded high resolution pictures of the world around them in exchange for in-game trinkets that have no physical value.
No Such Thing as a Free Pokemon
In the tech world there’s a common saying: “If something is free, you’re the product.”
The idea being that if you’re using some service without paying for it, there’s an excellent chance that the company providing said service is somehow making money off of the situation. So for example when a user looks up a particular topic with a search engine, they can be presented with contextually appropriate advertisements. By selling this ad space to companies, the search engine provider generates a profit for each “free” search performed by its users. The personal relevancy offered by such bespoke advertisements can be more effective than traditional TV or print ads, which in turn means the search engine provider can charge a premium for them.
Just as in our hypothetical search engine example, Pokemon Go is offered up to players on Android and iOS free of charge. To date, it’s been downloaded by over a billion total users. To make the game financially viable, Niantic eventually needed to find a way to turn all those free downloads into a revenue stream.
The answer is Niantic Spatial. This spin-off company was announced in March of 2025, and offers a Visual Positioning System (VPS) created in part using the photogrammetry data collected by Pokemon Go. Through this service Niantic Spatial offers centimeter-scale positioning for millions of high-traffic locations all over the globe, even in areas where GPS may be inaccurate.
Earlier this week, Niantic Spatial announced they had entered into an agreement with Coco Robotics to provide VPS for their fleet of delivery robots. Images captured by the robot’s onboard cameras can be fed into the VPS to provide a more accurate position than is possible with GPS, even in the best of conditions. This is particularly important for a robot that not only needs to navigate an ever-changing urban landscape, but must arrive at a precise location to successfully complete its delivery.
Always Read the Fine Print
At this point, you may be thinking to yourself that this all seems a bit shady. Can Niantic really take the data that was provided to them by Pokemon Go players and spin that off into a commercial venture that monetizes it? Of course they can, because that’s precisely what players agreed to when they installed the game.
Section 5.2 of the Niantic Terms of Service, titled “Rights Granted by You – AR Content”, states that the company retains wide-ranging rights over anything that users upload through the AR functions of their products:
In short, not only can Niantic do anything they want with player submitted data, but they can pass that freedom on to other entities as they see fit. So while Coco Robotics didn’t even exist when the AR Mapping feature was added to Pokemon Go, all of the imagery that players captured since that time — plus any images that they continue to capture — is fair game.
In the end, it’s unlikely that many players will lose any sleep over the fact that they have unwittingly been collecting training data to help robots more effectively deliver pizzas. But it’s also not hard to imagine a scenario in which that data ends up getting licensed out for some purpose they aren’t comfortable with.
If that happens, their options may be limited. A reading of Niantic’s Privacy Policy would seem to indicate that uploaded AR imagery is anonymized during processing, and as such doesn’t need to be treated in the same way that personally identifiable information would be. As such, players have the right to opt-out of uploading additional data going forward, but can’t remove what’s already been pushed into the system.
Regardless of whether or not this situation impacts you directly, it’s an important cautionary tale in an interconnected world where more and more of what users do online is tracked, filtered, processed, and sold off to the highest bidder. Perhaps something to keep in mind before clicking “I Agree.”
I remember doing a couple of scans with this a few years back. It was tedious and offered some in-game rewards.
Fast forward to today and now I can take pictures as a subcontractor with gig apps for home audits, photogrammetry and other areas.
From the play aspect of it, Pokemon’s a gateway to things that people will explore in tech.
You seem to have missed the entirety of the actual point being made.
Also the photogrammetry provided by gig apps is generally overpriced, bad, or both, for anything where it might really be necessary.
Now, maybe, just a bit, try to engage beyond the idea that technology gets used for a minute, and think about why it’s important to talk about how it’s used.
Honestly, I’m glad an Android game found a way to make money without serving endless ads or tricking kids into spending godly amounts of money on micro transactions by addiction tactics.
They did that too.
That’s what really grinds my gears about it all. They have micro transaction slop. Then did this on top of it all.
PoGo was somewhat based on a previous game called Ingress, which is a lot more competitive in nature. It has similar aspects: you get in-game medals for finding new physical locations of interest and taking pictures of them and submitting them to Niantic.
Note that Niantic no longer owns Pokemon Go. They sold it and most of their other games off in 2025, although they kept Ingress (and presumably the PoGo database.)
Regarding your note Niantic is now actually two different companies. Scopely purchased Niantic Inc. (formerly Niantic Labs) and the bulk of their games whilst Niantic Spatial who retained Ingress being spun off.
Whilst you’re technically correct in that Niantic no longer own Pokémon GO it’s still marketed as a Niantic product with no mention of Scopely anywhere in the game.
You now get directed to scopely for some helpdesk issues, but that is from the niantic page, not via the app.
I played lots of pogo, but only gleaned ingress. They obviously shared the same datasets with all the same landmarks . To me they are the same game with different skins
They are, though the actual gameplay is pretty different. Think of Ingress as the engine Niantic built on its systems, with a default game as an implementation demo and method of fine tuning for sane defaults.
It’s much the same way Quake 3 Arena was essentially a fine tuned, polished demo for the idtech3 engine that was then used in many other games. UE went the same direction, and DaOC demoed the mmo engine and server used by all of Bethesda’s games.
Ingress is still active, not that I’ve even opened it in a decade, but they even had an Anime produced at some point, so it’s still making money. And while they spun off or sold the other games, they host the core services those games rely on, meaning all of that data comes to them in the end anyway.
It should be obvious why Google didn’t keep them, despite also being deeply connected (the VPS system uses Google services itself). And this is the same reason they sold there games. For a big company it’s a regulatory hot potato, for a services company running one game it’s easier to downplay.
Notably this is also how companies like Palantir act to go under the radar, they “just” provide glue services, while facilitating wildly unethical things with their data.
I remember this, I was assigned to scan the Big Boy statue at a restaurant that just closed permanently. A few months later, it vanished and the building reopened under a different name. If the AI bot is expecting the Big Boy statue, it’ll be lost.
They outsource editing too: you can, as a player, submit pokestops for deletion or suggest movement if the submitter didn’t put it in the right place. This is routinely abused to shift stops into more advantageous locations, like so people who won’t get out of their cars to play can interact with a stop that’s well back from the street. In my experience dead stops usually get reported within about three months.
Despite the exploitation, this was necessary and almost entirely positive. They sync against Google, which provides the underlying maps in the first place, so abuse can only go so far. As for why it’s necessary, GPS reflection issues make accurate navigation by that alone impossible in some parts of cities. I know of a particular location where cell tower triangulation accuracy drops to 500 meters and GPS drifts constantly. Having users able to tweak locations is necessary both for the games and local businesses who are posted on Google maps.
Kids used to find pokemons inside the house. So wonderfult that our house is documented from inside also.
Playing since day one, I’ve never used the AR feature nor did I a scan field research. Never liked the feature and it is absolutely not necessary to get any virtual in-game rewards.
Rest assured, it doesn’t work like that. First, you’d have to let them in, for them to scan the inside of your house. Second, scanning poi’s is completely different to catching pokemon, and third, they are inevitably always scans of public places, or should be, because of awhole set of rules, and procedures in place about what constitutes a POI,
Being someone who works in GIS, this data is INVALUABLE! It’s not only a great way to provide a great mobile game without annoying apps or needing to be pay-to-win, but the data collected will directly benefit society. Love this and I wish the author understood just how much of a net-positive this is… it’s odd that they’d frame it as a quasi-privacy concern, when there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in public nationwide.
Parasite who makes a living off of privacy violations is surprised when people don’t like said privacy violations. Shocking. I can expect privacy wherever I want, and if enough people do the same, we can enforce this on you and put you out of a job.
Nah, most Pokémon Go players caught on pretty quick. Many of us already suspected Niantic was us to gather geolocation data. When the AR scan came out it was obvious that we were being used as free labor. It also gave pretty bad rewards. Most players abandoned the feature.
What people don’t know is the data has never changed from the original scans that Niantic made for Ingress. It used this thing called XM which were actual locations that Niantic scanned from locations of things like Google mobile searches. This allowed them to use that as a “density” map. So if you want to look for where Pokemon can be caught from. Look at the XM dots that appear in Ingress. The more dense the dots the more Pokemon you can catch. This XM wasn’t ported to Pokemon Go other than changing the probability of a Pokemon sighting, but it isn’t shown as anything on the map. In Ingress you need XM as health to be able to do things. So as you walk around you collect this XM until you can no longer pickup any more. This was always useful for pin pointing a person and following them around while watching the XM on the map. Try it out, you will see what I mean.
Glad I quit “playing” before the AR. Never left the house, but I travelled the world. Location spoofing, database disclosures and a desire to catch them all gave me the whole shebang. “Walked” the streets of London, Tokyo, New York, Moskva, etc. I had more fun breaking the rules than travelling somewhere just to play a game.
Week one pogo player, been playing for ten years now. Still have the same AR scan research task from when they released it all those years ago, have never done a single one. Sometimes I wonder what Pokemon it will reward me 😂
I always cheated the AR scans lol. Just go to the location face your camera to the interior light of your car then slowly move so it registers movement and it’s over in 10 seconds. It never gets an actual picture but somehow just registers the light as your scan. Or during the day at the ground or sun works too.
as an ingress player since beta which predates pogo, i’d be surprised if anyone didn’t realise it was also a data collection engine.
Same! Those that started early fully understood the trade off and it was a great and fun deal to me! Still play Pokemon Go today!
Me to, though I haven’t played in a long time now, but do you have any idea of the demographics involved? A lot of Ingress players are kids and non-tech literate adults, but PGo players? That’s nearly all of them. Think of every parent pushing their kids outside with a phone.
This kind of invisible exploitation is exactly what regulations are for. As opposed to the current push for ID, which only further serves as a tool for exploitation.
Guess how the company sourced the pokemon go locations ;)
Actually kind of sneaky-corporate-overlord creepy, and sounds like the plot of an Ernest Cline book.
It wouldn’t take much of a tweak to turn this whole idea into a Black Mirror episode.
This reminds me of the recent mobile game ads I’ve been seeing – a game where you can “purchase” other people physical property and apparently earn money from it.
You’re Welcome! Still playing PoGo
Funny. The AR features drained the battery so much that I stopped using them, and I never did the scanning research because (before the feature existed) I stopped having enough free time to devote a whole outing to Pokemon. I’m not even sure I’ve opened the app in the last year.
And I honestly thought the in-game purchases and location data were going to be the main money-makers :)
So, I think treating pizza delivery robots as benign is pretty naive. The only difference between these things and a Flock camera is that they have wheels and get a peek into people’s houses. The delivery companies will necessarily foster a close working relationship with law enforcement in an effort to protect the delivered goods from theft, it’s in their interests to make that relationship worthwhile for police. If you look at the history of products like the Ring doorbell, we have lots of precedent for companies having no qualms about offering up their products’ surveillance capabilities to police. The pizza robots will at a minimum serve a secondary function as passive surveillance platforms, and more realistically serve as a pilot project to land grants and contracts to break into the emerging market for “public safety robots”.
These robots will also need human supervision for the foreseeable future, which means replacing the local couriers, nominally protected by (already-severely-degraded by gigification) local labor protections, with remote “drivers”/”supervisors” in whatever country will allow them to be paid the least, with the most intensive workload they can get away with. As the navigational capabilities improve, the process of “driving” will get more abstract, until workers are spending all day swiping through feeds of disconnected images answering simple yes/no questions about whether some object has been recognized correctly, or if some uncertain path looks ok. This is the real selling point of the current wave of AI and robotics tech, it’s not that this stuff can actually replace skilled human labor, but it can facilitate breaking the application of that skill into ever more abstract, disconnected, alienated pieces that can be re-arranged at a moment’s notice, making it even harder for workers to organize.
“In short, not only can Niantic do anything they want with player submitted data, but they can pass that freedom on to other entities as they see fit.”
Not sure how it is in the US, but here in Europe: if a clause in a contract is against the law, it is void. And if Niantic acts on that clause in the contract, they are doing something illegal.
No matter if the consumer signed the contract and gave consent… Because the consumer is not in the position to give the other party of the contract permission to break the law…
But at the time that Pokemon Go was in its heighday, I don’t think there were any laws on promiscuous gathering of privacy-related data and the selling of it to third parties.
I am not a lawyer, but I think that with the current privacy laws in the EU, Niantic could get into trouble real quick.