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.
If you’ve played the game, the scanning function is only for what they call Pokestops: These are points of interest that you can walk to and get items in the game. The game gives you points if you walk in a circle around one and take a short video.
They’re relatively sparse. At most, they captured some 3D models of some things like signs, small landmarks (up close) and the fronts of some buildings.
The images captured by something like Google Maps are a million times more useful for someone trying to construct a world model with a lot of coverage. The Pokémon Go captures would be useful if you wanted something like a detailed 3D scan of the sign in front the student building or something.
If this is happening it would be easy to detect by the upload bandwidth spiking during AR mode.
The 3D scan mode is a specific feature you have to use in the app that uploads 100s of megabytes afterward. It advises you to go on WiFi to do it.
If the AR mode was secretly uploading images that would be a scandal in itself.
Currently active theaters. And now there are detailed locations of our cities. We might not get killbots today but we will get pacificationbots.
Visual navigation is prone to degradation. Keeping the "map" updated requires constant visits. (I know because my team worked on the patent for a method for updating said maps.)
Also Pacification bot would be run by the military who most lilkey have GPS.
Finally, For ground based bots, SLAM is actually more useful, rather than pre-built map based navigation.
If GP has access to this dataset it would be interesting to know how sparse is the data in that area.
What time you have in mind, that was really better?
(I believe the 90s were at least way more optimistic)
The Pokémon Go data is for small little islands around their points of interest (pokestops).
It’s not a detailed city map. The data is extremely sparse and only covers little tiny bubble around their sparse in game POIs.
The way it was represented as some sort of high resolution city map or world model was quite ridiculous.
That's not the impression I get from the TV ads.
The ads they run show people walking along sidewalks and through forested paths and through parks in AR mode.
Ground drones however are targeted by the FPV drones (wired or radio controlled), so the new thing is to have a thing with automatic targeting to shoot those. Then again, I at least heard about using something open-cv (yes, some of those run actual linux) shaped on the FPV drone itself, as it really helps with the amount of jamming going on.
“We just launch it and we know everything will be dead – everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead,” says Kokhanovskyy. “There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing… Everything it sees will be killed.”
Civilians dying in an armed conflict doesn't cut the definition of warcrime by itself. Deliberate targeting and intentional destruction of civil infrastructure that supports life or something like it is.
Then of course there is stuff that ICC isn't getting busy about which is clearly above the threshold -- the regular drone safaris in and around Kherson (city with pre-war population circa quarter million people) happening for the last few years.
The ICC judges have less real-world power than a Pop Idol judge.
The ICC only works if every nation plays by the rules. Fewer and fewer do these days.
How likely is your opinion to change in the light of the information that, according to the article, it's Ukraine who uses these drones?
Pessimistically, maybe democracy's days are numbered
that was in the cards in the early 2000s when the Patriot Act got passed, mate.
now they just have the muscle (drones) to back it up.
welcome to the cyberpunk dystopia
There are clear parallels in the modern world of societies when the ruling machinery doesn't need those things from their population - petrostates. The people in these states tend to be viewed as subjects, not citizens. That's where we are headed
A corporate council of emperor kings with armies of pacification bots. The tiny sliver of window we have to ensure this doesn't happen is rapidly closing and there seems to be no movement toward ensuring that this doesn't culminate with the entire power of this new revolution in the hands of a small class of near demigods.
i think killbots are absolutely a possibility, and very soon.
rightwing pundits and meme makers are already unironically quoting Zechariah 13:8
But presumably the images/models at ground level can be used to train/improve the general performance of Vantor's aerial (satelite based) navigation system so it works better elsewhere?
It almost 1-1 data correlation, n-phone Pokémon go scans of a location helping a drone locate itself in the same location in correlation with Maxar’s satellite data.
There maybe some hyper corner case uses. Maybe the billion scans in New York City help them generalize across different phone lenses characteristics, but phone and drone lenses are so different.
Would love to hear some specifics if I’m wrong here.
there was a startup that pitched the idea of using Satellite data to do ground based navigation. (https://sturfee.com/vps) they didn't get bought out by either google, niantic or facebook, so it can't of worked that well.
Niantic's stuff is a pre-built map that the client will reference to get a position. Its essentially a massive feature matching exercise. The problem with using airborn photos is that you miss a bunch of features you can't see. (samy thing trying to match ground features from the air.)
THe lens calibration issue isn't actually that much of a problem _for the client_. if you have a rough idea of the lens (exif data really helps there) then you can still get meter accurate (and a few degrees heading) its a bit more of a problem for generating the initial map, but Structure from motion with good motion priors goes a long way to make it less of a problem
Now, Niantic are proposing that you can train a model that can relocalize generally without a detailed map, I think thats a bit far fetch, especially to do at any large scale. (ie bigger than a cubic kilometer)
The headline, which I do understand is in question, talks about training, not using the scans as a database. It is likely that you are right that the scans are not being used to provide localization data, but that is also not what the headline is pointing to.
The headline specifically speaks to using the scans for training. While I do not have any inside baseball, the problem space is often solved using neural nets and other machine learning algorithms. On the surface it seems likely that they would benefit from training data that doesn't necessarily need to be from where the conflict is actually taking place. A base world model, for example, can be developed from data collected anywhere in the world. Its is not an entirely different universe when you step into another country.
But you are suggesting that the algorithms used are entirely classical (i.e. no AI/ML)?
"get data for drone warfare" ...in 2021 (before the russian invasion...)
but did we even EXPECT drone warfare to influence the war THIS MUCH back then?
well not me -- I actually thought russia would beat the crap out of ukraine within a month (even after the failed spetsnaz attack on zelensky)
the article's assumptions only makes sense IF some people had time machines, or if CIA has some know-everything future prophet
(not to mention: drones need TOP TO BOTTOM view, not bottom-to-top view)
anyway, my verdict: sensational yellow journal article, nothing more/less
but... drones? that's just yellow journalism optimized for SEO keyword (and anyone who clicks an article with 'drone')
Is Pokémon Go not played in the Middle East, India, Taiwan, Korea or Japan?
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).
All of them but Japan?
MEA has stuff going on beyond Iran, Lebanon or whatever country the US decides to invade this week. India has two nuclear neighbours with border disputes and weekly scuffles, sometimes a downed jet fighter or two. Taiwan is probably the biggest geopolitical tension/war/invasion possibility of our time. Korea is in a stalemate unfinished war for decades. Japan has its own very real dispute scenarios with China.
I know drone scans from Pokemon Go probably won't help in the Himalayas or South China Sea, but those regions are far from trouble free
Works less well if you want to use structures for radar cover.
ofc going by the entire surface of the earth its not a lot of places, but i would never call such a thing statistically insignificant..
There's even a Pokemon exclusive to the middle east region: sandstorm pattern Vivillion. Lots of players there.
Maxar is/was primarily a satellite data company, and to say Pokemon data would add any major value in any of today's active drone deployments with the level of Satellite coverage Maxar already has is a wide stretch.
Moreover, ground forces in the area would need pretty heavy jamming tech in place too for this kind of data to be useful. It's a sliver of a sliver of a sliver situation.
According to Wikipedia, more than half of the Middle East countries are either belligerents or were otherwise attacked in the ongoing war.
But what I mean is that there are enough players there to be significant part of the ecosystem. The war made obtaining those Vivillion harder.
I am a daily player, I have scanned something once, the rewards were minuscule, I never did it again. I have that specific vivillon which was hard to get because not many players were from the relevant area even before the current events, and I just can't see how the war is related to any of this.
For now.
rapid 3d modeling of topography and cityscapes + supplementation with other data, e.g. pokemon. But ultimately that's supplementation, not the main effort.
Can you elaborate?
GPS can be faulty in cities.
Pokémon Go scans, are primarily in cities.
The mapping in the article, is specifically saying to use visual cues when GPS is faulty.
How is this not directly 1-1 overlapping, the gap and the solution.
However that data has a half life and needs to be refreshed.
For flying drones, ground level data is really not that useful. mainly because you can't see it, because its obscured by trees, building and clouds.
But, this is not a new thing. Google, Apple, facebook and niantic all have VPSs as do a bunch of other startups.
For Drones you will probably need SLAM to capture the map, and then once you have the initial map, you can keep it updated.
You can experiment at home using https://github.com/colmap
Also Vantar: "The superpower of generative AI is that data in one task generalizes to other tasks!"
are you saying that drone training in quiet residential neighborhoods is not training? are you saying self driving cars can only drive in theaters where they've been trained, because autonomous training is always specific by neighborhood? are you saying that if a particular region has some novel terrain that all previous training must be discarded?
If you train a soldier in the US, is he unable to do those things outside the US?
The United States is one pretty warmongerish nation by any account.
Compared to other modern nations, but compared to history vary peaceful.
It is not childish to aspire to be better.
Seems to me that most of our friends in the balkans that have memory of the past wars are overall pretty happy about the current state of things, and there hasn't been wars to contend Alsace-Lorraine in 80 years, is it a record already?
War is very much not a given in the civilized world
Powerless without american hardware and intelligence: You wish. Big tech is spending so much lobbying our governments in fear of us leaving them for open solutions, or god forbid paying fair amount of taxes.
And regarding intelligence, we would have been so much better without the CIA & co spying our politicians and messing with our governments, aiding and sponsoring domestic right wing terrorism for the past 50 years.
the only reason we dont have antimatter weapons or gravity guns is because we haven't figured out how.
That's the state today. Throughout history there's been a long negotiation about what weapons have been allowed in combat.
It's a feature of open data, it's open and usable by anyone.
MapComplete is a nice alternative if you care about some part of the map that are not easily filterable by StreetComplethttps://mapcomplete.org/
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.
I seriously loath, hate & despise everything about this digital panopticon world being constructed around us.
Even 100s of yummy grandma-cheeseburgers is not worth feeding private data brokers detailed maps of our own communities.
Nowadays some of them are just as likely to sell the data to the other side.
Nowadays the other side may get access to them without us even knowing.
Yep... collecting domestic geo data is a double-edged sword.
Counterexample, guns could be a (non-violent) hobby. I’m not pro guns or violence but just pointing out the logical issue here
Guns feed families and protect people too.
They are dual use like all tech from knives to nukes.
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.
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.
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
I guess this also explains how they were paying for the free 3d model photogrammetry processing that app does.
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.
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.
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)
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.
It should also be pointed out that Kirill and the Russian Orthodox Church have been understood to have been cat's paws for Russia's notorious KGB successor agencies for a very long time now.
> the Russians are calling "our partners", "our would-be enemies" now.
is a total wind vane which can flip 180° in a matter of days (if not minutes, as in Orwell's scene where they seamlessly switch from being at war with Eurasia to that with Eastasia)...
"Nazi" -- in Russia -- means anybody that Russia hates, resents, is jealous of, or otherwise dislikes. Anybody not explicitly in Russia's thrall is "anti-Russian", considered an enemy, and is hence labelled a "Nazi".
Coincidentally, this "Whoever isn't with us, is against us" thinking is a hallmark of fascist regimes like the actual Nazi Germany, where it was an article of faith.
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)?
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.
I am not joking though, I really would consider any data generated on public assets to be considered "releasable" to the public. How many people should get killed by self-driving cars because the company making the cars didn't have enough data to train proper models?
This may be good and we'd still not have the data (but "they" can collect on their own privately/secretly)
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.
There is no 'we'. 99%+ of people view the world as a zero sum game where for me to win, somebody has to lose and if I don't do whatever it takes, somebody else will and then I lose, therefore I have no morals or principles or virtues and anyone who does is a liar or a fool.
Everything is a bad faith act, everyone is a selfish bad faith actor and I shouldn't feel bad about being one because everyone else who isn't a fool is too.
This tragically wrong but intuitively correct worldview and much more was explained by Plato long, long ago and just about no one understood any of it. At least the text survived and people with 140+ IQ and an iota of decency can read it and be at peace knowing they're not crazy or foolish.
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.
Enter AI, a new era of soulless wonder.
Intelligentia Artificiosa.
Ingenium Artificum.
— Dreams of Silicon and Sorrow
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.
and we even have youtube videos like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IiJOHV9rIxU
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
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...
This is about players all over the world contributing scans of their own countries to US military, though.
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.
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--
Is the geographical data more useful, or are buildings and other structures more important?
Genuinely don't know much in this space.
You also need a day/night dataset (although some newer descriptors are day/night resistant)
Have you ever seen a commercial use of anything like this? That should give you a hint about how reliable these systems get.
Shops come and go, churches do not move, schools tend not to move much, industry areas is somewhat dynamic, military installations might be static or dynamic, trees grow or are removed.
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.
Niantic has the benefit that they can steer "volunteers" to specific points, though.
... Except, well, when it's the doing of this same, so called "defence" industry.
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.
Or maybe sometimes censorship actually DOES protect its citizens?
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?
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.
Normal players would have noticed the bandwidth and CPU usage, and volunteers have already agreed to data sharing, so there's no point in keeping secrets. Same as claims that the Facebook app listens to people talk: someone would have caught it by now.
Also, AR capture was never very popular, mostly a gimmick for new players. The game was already a battery and power hog even without it.
I was able to create a full 3d model of my window plant almost free of obscured areas from a few dozens still photos taken all around it, back in 2018, using the Capturing Reality photogrammetry app on a mobile i7-3610QM CPU with 8Gb RAM, in about 40-60 minutes.
And that's pretty mundane general public software, do we know for sure which algorithms are used by Niantic?
I'd say... the versatility of photos provides the "ground truth" on its own when combined to one single dataset. Say you want to program a guided drone shooting through urban areas, you want it to work under all sorts of conditions - day, night, rain, snow, the sun visible from all possible angles and throwing shadows.
A dataset that you can get from something like Street View? You can at best generate that once a year at enormous expense. Still valuable because a Street View car likely has a multitude of highest-quality GNSS receivers and possibly RTK navigation aids, but to make the dataset usable for 24/7/365 navigation you absolutely need a huge, huge amount of backfill.
Every. Single. Time.
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...
>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 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.
This is not at all an honest way of saying "Niantics founder raised money from In-Q-Tel"
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.
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.
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.
Same mentality.
Thanks for playing. (You got played)
People literally traded military intelligence for Pokémon.
I mean, you can blame whoever you want, even Pikachu. Neither Niantic nor even one person cares who you blame.
