Here’s All The Data Pokemon Go Is Collecting From Your Phone:
Like most apps that work with the GPS in your smartphone, Pokemon Go can tell a lot of things about you based on your movement as you play: Where you go, when you went there, how you got there, how long you stayed, and who else was there. And, like many developers who build those apps, Niantic keeps that information.
According to the Pokemon Go privacy policy, Niantic may collect — among other things — your email address, IP address, the web page you were using before logging into Pokemon Go, your user name, and your location. And if you use your Google account for sign-in, unless you specifically revoke it, Niantic has access to your entire Google account. That means Niantic has read and write access to your email, Google Drive docs, and more. (It also means that if the Niantic servers are hacked, whoever hacked the servers would potentially have access to your entire Google account. And you can bet the game’s extreme popularity has made it a target for hackers. Given the number of children playing the game, that’s a scary thought.) You can check what kind of access Niantic has to your Google account here.
Well, that was short lived. App: deleted, access: revoked.
This is why I said Pokemon Go was a privacy and data mining disaster.
It’s **really** important to understand that, even if you believe that you can trust Niantic to no abuse your data, we live in an era of data breaches. If a bad person somehow accesses the information this company has collected about you (information that is totally not necessary to play the game. I mean, Google Drive? Really? Your docs? Your email?), you could be in a world of shit.
Pokemon Go has added billions of dollars of value to the companies involved in the game, which is fair because it’s apparently a LOT of fun to play. That said, it’s profoundly irresponsible that they are collecting this information, and they need to be pressured to stop that practice.
And then there’s this. Just be careful, and maybe drop the company a line and tell them to clean up their permissions and make sure they encrypt their damn databases.
I saw one person comment that they set up a new Google account to log in with.
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/29RUH3Y