A story keeps resurfacing online: “Pokémon Go used players’ positions to build a 3D map of the world.” The real story is more precise, and more interesting. In a November 2024 post on the Niantic Labs blog, Niantic researchers Eric Brachmann and Victor Adrian Prisacariu described how scans made by players of its games were being used to build a detailed 3D map, and the next step: a “Large Geospatial Model”, an AI foundation model for the physical world.
Let’s get the correction out of the way first, because it matters. According to Niantic, this was not passive tracking of everyone who played. It was built from optional scans that players chose to make. The details are below, in Niantic’s own words.
What Niantic built
Niantic’s Visual Positioning System (VPS) takes a single image from a phone and works out where the phone is and which way it is pointing, down to the centimetre, according to the company. To do that, it matches the image against a 3D map “built from people scanning interesting locations in our games and Scaniverse”, Niantic’s 3D scanning app.
Those scans, Niantic wrote, are taken from different perspectives, at different times of day and over many years, “with positioning information attached”. Because they come from people on foot, the data is “taken from a pedestrian perspective and includes places inaccessible to cars”: parks, courtyards, footpaths, the places a mapping car never drives.
The numbers in the post, as of November 2024:
- 10 million scanned locations around the world, of which over 1 million had been activated for the positioning service.
- About 1 million fresh scans every week, each containing hundreds of images.
- More than 50 million neural networks trained, with over 150 trillion parameters in total, operating in over a million locations.
The bigger plan: a “foundation model” for the physical world
The post set out Niantic’s ambition to go further: a Large Geospatial Model (LGM) that learns from all those local models, the way large language models learn from text, and could power AR glasses, robotics, autonomous systems, content creation, spatial planning and logistics. “Spatial intelligence will become the world’s future operating system,” the authors wrote.
An immense influx of geospatial data is needed – a kind of data not many organizations have access to. Therefore, Niantic is in a unique position…
Niantic Labs, November 2024
That sentence is the heart of the story. The data that makes such a model possible is rare, and it was gathered through games people played for fun.
What Niantic says about consent
An editor’s note on the post answers the question most readers have. In Niantic’s words, scanning is “completely optional – people have to visit a specific publicly-accessible location and click to scan”, and “merely walking around playing our games does not train an AI model.”
So the honest summary is this: players who chose to scan places contributed to a 3D map, and that map is the raw material for an AI model with commercial uses far beyond the games. Nobody was secretly followed. But it is fair to guess that many people who tapped “scan” to earn an in-game reward were not thinking about robots, logistics companies or AR glasses.
Niantic’s old website now reads “Scopely Explore, formerly known as Niantic”: the games business has changed hands. What happens to data collected under one company’s terms after a business changes owners is a question worth asking of any app you use.
The lesson: data you create for fun has value you don’t see
Niantic published its plans openly and says the scans were opt-in. Many apps are less forthcoming. Location, photos, contacts and usage data flow from ordinary apps into analytics companies and data brokers every day, often through software development kits the user never hears about. We looked at how that economy works in data brokers and your Mac and in the data-broker economy and least privilege.
A few practical checks, on your phone and your Mac:
- Review which apps have Location and Camera access. On a Mac: System Settings › Privacy & Security › Location Services and Camera. On a phone, the equivalent privacy settings. Remove what an app doesn’t need.
- Read what a “scan”, “share” or “contribute” button actually contributes to, especially when a game rewards you for it.
- Assume that data you give an app may outlive your use of the app, and even the company’s current owner.
Where FireAI helps, on your Mac
FireAI protects Macs, not phones, so it has nothing to do with what you scan in a mobile game. On your Mac it answers the question this story raises for every other app: what is this app sending, and to whom?
- The world map shows every connection your Mac’s apps make and where it goes, including analytics and advertising destinations.
- Per-app rules let you block an app, or just the analytics domain it talks to, while the app keeps working.
- Camera and microphone watch tells you which app turned on the camera or mic and what it sent meanwhile.
- FireAI’s own AI runs on your Mac: what it analyses never becomes someone else’s training data.
Your data has a value, even when you don’t see it. Decide who gets it. Download FireAI and try it free for 17 days. FireAI is made by HisnLabs. Pokémon Go is a trademark of its owners; this article is not affiliated with Niantic, Scopely or The Pokémon Company.