Pokémon Go's Robot Data Deal Lands as a Privacy Wake-Up Call

The structural problem the Niantic case exposes is not a loophole — it is the intended architecture of consumer data collection. Scopely acquired Pokémon Go in March 2025; Niantic Spatial retained the spatial data corpus and began licensing it to robotics clients whose AI models needed real-world urban navigation training. The transaction was legal. The delivery robots now navigating city blocks owe their sidewalk fluency to a decade of players who thought they were chasing Pikachu.