China's Ministry of State Security (MSS) warned on Monday that a series of cases in recent years have highlighted the growing risks posed by the illegal collection and misuse of game data. While marketed as an augmented reality (AR) experience, certain games effectively induce players to perform highly precise 3D point-cloud scans, enabling the real-time collection of geospatial data.

Recently, some foreign media reports revealed that a leading AI company behind a leading AR mobile game had amassed nearly 30 billion environmental scans uploaded by players and reportedly used them to train AI models capable of recognizing and understanding physical spaces.

Given the company’s reported partnerships with defense contractors in another country, concerns have emerged that such models could ultimately be adapted for military applications. The reports have fueled global debate over the potential militarization of civilian data and served as a stark reminder of the growing data security challenges in the digital intelligence era, according to the MSS’s official WeChat account.

AR overlays virtual content onto the real world, creating an interactive experience that seamlessly blends digital and physical environments. However, the MSS said that AR captures far more data than ordinary photographs. Users often grant broad permissions by accepting lengthy terms of service, allowing apps to collect and upload data continuously with little awareness. Also, every AR frame is precisely geotagged with GPS coordinates, altitude, device orientation, and timestamps.

There, users often have little visibility into or control over how their data is used, and even anonymized datasets can be re-identified through cross-referencing  exposing personal information or turning users into unwitting sources of data for foreign military projects.

Such practices also undermine public trust by violating basic business ethics, potentially damaging confidence in AR technologies and the wider digital ecosystem. More broadly, if sensitive geospatial data is acquired by foreign intelligence agencies, it can be aggregated into high-precision 3D models and transformed into actionable intelligence that could threaten national security, according to the MSS.

The MSS reminded the public to follow the principle of minimum necessary permissions when installing map and AR applications, avoiding granting continuous location and camera access unless essential. It also urged users not to photograph, scan, or check in at sensitive locations, and to exercise caution toward data collection tasks released by overseas organizations or unknown platforms under the guise of surveys or game testing.