Both Nintendo and Pokemon Company also hold undisclosed stakes in Niantic.
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Franken additionally asked Niantic to provide an update on a vulnerability detected on Monday by security researchers who found Pokemon GO players signing into the game via a Google account on an Apple iOS device unwittingly gave “full access permission” to the person’s Google account.
Investors are understandably excited about Pokemon Go and its augmented reality features, but after today’s surge, the bar has been set high very high for Nintendo.
According to Google’s summary of what “full account access” entails, granting such access means “the application can see and modify almost all information in your Google Account”.
On Tuesday, Niantic responded to the growing criticism by acknowledging the issue in the game’s first update.
Although Niantic confirmed to Mashable the app was not accessing the all-ranging data tied to a user’s Google account and that no user data had been compromised – the app only accesses your Google User ID and email address – many players chose to uninstall the app or use an alternate dummy account to prevent any possible data breach. Niantic clarified only basic profile information was being utilized, but that has been made clear in the most recent app update with a note of the “fixed Google account scope”.
The game is freely available for download on the App Store and on Google Play, but it supports in-app purchases or micro-transactions.
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That data “can then be shared with [the app provider] and “third party service providers”… for a non-exhaustive list of purposes”.
