The real trouble began around 2021, when Pokémon Go casually began asking players to upload videos of their experience at Pokéstops. They’d even earn extra in-game goodies for scanning the surrounding area, capturing buildings, streets, and trees, and if they allowed Niantic to, you know, hang on to the footage, they could get even more very cool and exclusive in-game loot. That data was incredibly valuable, not only to gamers but also to intelligence and defense contractors, particularly Vantor, which had been doing some aerial positioning since February 2025. Trouw claims those scans were fed as raw material for a Visual Positioning System (VPS) that picks up when GPS fails. GPS signals are regularly jammed in warzones. By combining ground and aerial maps amassed by the game, they effectively do not need GPS. The VPS can find a location based on the detailed 3D world model from just a few pixels without the need for a jamming satellite.
Vantor, the company that would license the data for VPS, denied using game data for its drones but declined to say whether upcoming models were trained on Pikachu hunts. However, it’s unlikely that the system ever would’ve advanced so quickly without the billions of scans generated by people looking for that smug, lonely Mew. Once the data is in the system, it cannot be traced back to the game. As of December 2025, the game has an average of 110 million active monthly players.
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