China's Ministry of State Security has warned that data from popular phone games could be used to train foreign military AI models.
The ministry urged gamers to be wary of app check-in locations that seem abnormally clustered around classified or restricted facilities.
The warning quoted media reports about the militarisation of civilian data, saying billions of environmental scans from a popular mobile phone game were being used to train AI models with potential battlefield applications.
“The report has fuelled global concern over the ‘militarisation of civilian data’ and served as a warning of the growing data security challenges in the digital intelligence era,” the ministry said.
Niantic Spatial, a spin-off from Niantic, owns nearly 30 billion scans from the game and used these data in training a 3D model for precise navigation when GPS drops, according to Dutch media outlet Trouw.
