How Pokémon Go became entangled in international espionage

An official from Belarus' defence ministry claimed that Pokémon Go was an instrument of Western intelligence and had been used to collect information about Belarusian military installations near Minsk, said Politico.

Speaking on a talk show, Alexander Ivanov said: "On the territory of the 50th air base, where the runway is, where there is a lot of military aviation equipment. That's where there were the most Pokémon. Is this not intelligence information?"

As current and former devotees will remember, Pokémon Go is an augmented reality app that allows players to use their smartphones to capture digital characters from the popular 1990s franchise in the physical world. What is less well known is that the 2016 global phenomenon sparked national security concerns from intelligence agencies around the world amid accusations it was in fact a secret espionage tool – suspicions that persist to this day.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

An 'extraordinary scheme'

Ivanov's accusations echo those made at the time of the game's release by Russian ultranationalist ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, who claimed Niantic, the San-Francisco-based developer of the app, was linked to a CIA venture-capital firm. Influential figures in Russia depicted the app as an "extraordinary scheme by the US secret services to craftily enlist millions of people across the world to photograph and film hidden, out-of-the-way places"said Radio Free Europe.

The fact that "Pokémon can be found in every corner of the earth", as the app told users when they downloaded the game, was "precisely the problem" said the The New York Times at the time.

In Egypt, Al Jazeera reported that senior officials viewed the game as a "major threat to national security" that allegedly exposed the country's vital security sites to the world.

"Pokémon Go is the latest tool used by spy agencies in the intel war, a cunning despicable app that tries to infiltrate our communities in the most innocent way under the pretext of entertainment," Hamdi Bakheet, a member of Egypt's committee of defence and national security, told parliament in 2016.

Kuwait was among several countries that prohibited the app's use at government sites, while Iran went one step further and became the first county to ban it completely because of unspecified "security concerns", the BBC reported. China justified its own ban by describing it as a "threat to geographical information security".

A 'new era' of spying

The explosion of the Pokémon Go craze in 2016 "dovetailed with a new era of digital spying", said Foreign Policy. Suddenly, vast reams of data were being willingly harvested and shared by users on apps and social media, representing a huge opportunity for security services who "dove headlong into stealing, hacking, or buying data from the private sector that they could not somehow procure elsewhere".

There is "zero evidence that Pokémon Go was ever connected to a foreign intelligence agency, or used for spying by any intelligence agency, foreign or domestic". Much of the confusion during the game's peak in popularity in 2016 "may have just sprung from basic lack of understanding about the mechanics of the game" and its GPS function.

But although such suspicions may have been unfounded at the time, but today fears around the effects of surveillance capitalism – epitomised by platforms such as TikTok – are very much real, making Pokémon Go "a sort of Charizard in the coal mine".