Pokemon Go Had Players Capturing More Than They Realized

Pokemon Go Had Players Capturing More Than They Realized | Hackaday Skip to content 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.” 14 thoughts on “ Pokemon Go Had Players Capturing More Than They Realized ” No such thing as a free lunch. Report comment Reply TANSTAAFL if your an Asimov fan Report comment Reply Do you mean Heinlein? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_such_thing_as_a_free_lunch Report comment Reply There is if you steal it. Free = free (for me). Report comment Reply There’s free lunch in prison and psikhushka and I’ve been in both. Avoid free lunches at regular hospitals though, their notoriously bad and can make you vomit the first time you’re staying. Report comment Reply 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. Report comment Reply 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. Report comment Reply 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.) Report comment Reply 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. Report comment Reply 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. Report comment Reply Kids used to find pokemons inside the house. So wonderfult that our house is documented from inside also. Report comment Reply 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. Report comment Reply 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 😂 Report comment Reply 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. Report comment Reply Leave a Reply Cancel reply Please be kind and respectful to help make the comments section excellent. ( Comment Policy ) This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. 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