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| - According to a blog post on Niantic’s official website, it is only the optional "Pokémon GO" feature called "Scan a PokéStop" that contributes to the machine learning of its AI geography model.
A claim that the developer behind the popular mobile video game "Pokémon GO," Niantic Labs, used geolocation data collected from players to build a new artificial intelligence (AI) navigation system circulated online in November 2024.
A user on TikTok posted a video sharing his thoughts about the alleged news, causing one user to respond, "Whaaaaat? The free app was collecting and monetizing your data??? No! Not in 2024!!!"
@unrealwhosane #pokemon #pokemongo ♬ original sound - POLITICAL MEMES
The claim was also posted to Reddit, linking to an article on the website ArsTechnica, an outlet self-described as dedicated to "news and reviews, analysis of technology trends and expert advice on topics ranging from the most fundamental aspects of technology to the many ways technology is helping us discover our world."
A user on Reddit responded, "This is why I stopped playing after like two weeks. I bet they have maps of the inside of everyone's home, too." Somebody else responded, "That's the job of the robot vacuum cleaners!" Another user added, "So what everyone predicted they were doing when they added the "scanning pokestops" mechanic? I'm shocked."
Indeed, the claim that Niantic used player data in the construction of what the company calls a "Large Geospatial Model" is true.
However, as the user in the Reddit post pointed out, this data is specific to a portion of the game that directs players to "scan a PokéStop" at locations in the real world that Niantic describes as "great places that encourage exploration, exercise or social interactions with others." Users are encouraged to scan PokéStops to gather necessary in-game items.
According to a blog post on Niantic's official website, this is the only element of "Pokémon GO" that contributes to the machine learning of their AI geography model. The introduction to the post reads:
Editor's note: We use player-contributed scans of public real-world locations to help build our Large Geospatial Model. This scanning feature is completely optional – people have to visit a specific publicly-accessible location and click to scan. This allows Niantic to deliver new types of AR [augmented reality] experiences for people to enjoy. Merely walking around playing our games does not train an AI model.
This essentially means that players capturing Pokémon without actively scanning these special locations are not contributing to Niantic's geospatial model. However, the company's privacy policy is clear that it is still collecting location data from players.
The policy reads, in part, "Our Services include location-based games whose core feature is to provide an experience tied to your real-world location, so we need to know where you are to operate these apps and games for you and to plan the location of in-game or in-app resources (for example, PokéStops within 'Pokémon GO')."
As for what a "large geospatial model" actually does, the company describes it as a 3D evolution of "large language models" like ChatGPT.
Their description of its alleged functionality is:
Imagine yourself standing behind a church. Let us assume the closest local model has seen only the front entrance of that church, and thus, it will not be able to tell you where you are. The model has never seen the back of that building. But on a global scale, we have seen a lot of churches, thousands of them, all captured by their respective local models at other places worldwide. No church is the same, but many share common characteristics. An LGM is a way to access that distributed knowledge.
An LGM distills common information in a global large-scale model that enables communication and data sharing across local models. An LGM would be able to internalize the concept of a church, and, furthermore, how these buildings are commonly structured. Even if, for a specific location, we have only mapped the entrance of a church, an LGM would be able to make an intelligent guess about what the back of the building looks like, based on thousands of churches it has seen before. Therefore, the LGM allows for unprecedented robustness in positioning, even from viewpoints and angles that the VPS has never seen.
One question raised by the TikTok video that was not addressed in Niantic's blog post was the suggestion that the company had placed PokéStops in locations it still needed to collect data for.
However, a representative for Niantic pointed out to Snopes that the creation of PokéStops, a process it calls the Wayfarer program, is user-generated and community-approved.
A page on the "Pokémon GO" help center says:
Once you have reached Level 37, you are eligible to submit Wayspot nominations. A Wayspot is a unique place that exists in the real world, like objects, locations, or landmarks, that would make good additions to the Niantic real-world map.
Once submitted, your Wayspot nomination will be evaluated by Niantic's player community.
Highly rated nominations may be accepted and added to the Niantic real-world map. Keep in mind that not all accepted nominations will become a PokéStop or even a Gym, however, they may appear in other Niantic games.
"Pokémon GO" was released in 2016 in the United States, which prompted many fact-checks related to the game from Snopes, including claims that the game helped clear dogs from an animal shelter, that a man trying to catch a Pokémon in Massachusetts caused a major traffic accident, that the game caused a fatal car crash in Tennessee and that "The Simpsons" predicted the popularity of the game years before its release.
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