Link: https://dronexl.co/2026/06/09/pokemon-go-scans-niantic-vantor-military-drone-navigation/

Pokémon Go players' 30 billion scans trained navigation tech now bound for military drones, via Niantic Spatial's defense partnership with Vantor.

Yeah, this is why I never did Scan tasks.

If you played the game at all, you did scan tasks. The entire game was not "oh cute gacha AR game fully funded by in game purchases"

It was constantly recording and uploading POV-perspective camera footage to train AI models and gain ground-level depth-added geometric data that could be used by advanced mapping software to create fully 3D maps of areas that would take trillions of dollars to do at that scale otherwise.

I never turned on AR, sounds like a battery waster.

And I have had the same, "Scan thisnPokestop" task sitting since they launched the feature.

Most serious players didn’t use AR modes from what I remember, they got a lot of location data though

So you never turned on camera permissions required to run the game? You never turned on your GPS?

You could turn off your camera permissions, it would just prevent you from using AR mode which most people didn’t use anyway because it took way longer to load than the typical catch screen and drained your battery

The article is talking about the scan pokestops feature, which is an explocit mechanic where you walk around something holding your camera pointed at it.

Pokemon are harder to catch in AR too.