Users can turn off the permission by accessing their phone’s settings.
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Security researchers raised concerns about the vulnerability of users’ data after finding that Pokemon Go players signing into the game via a Google account on an Apple operating system device unwittingly gave “full access permission” to Google accounts.
However, this update was not exclusively put in place to assuage the millions of Pokémon Go users that have made the app almost more popular than Twitter.
“When Pokemon Go servers experience issues, so do I”, a user with the handle @_emilymcc wrote in a post on the aussieoutages.com website.
For those unfamiliar with the semantics of erroneously – it’s a fancy way for the developer to admit it fudged up and didn’t mean to collect all of that information.
Niantic, a company that partners with Nintendo, said it discovered the app requested full access to information stored in users’ Google accounts, information the company said it did not need.
And Niantic has heard the alarm bells going off. In a statement to tech blog Gizmodo, they stated, “Google will soon reduce Pokémon Go’s permission to only the basic profile data that Pokémon go needs, and users do not need to take any actions themselves”. He was dismayed to find that it had the same level of access to his Google account as Google’s own Chrome browser.
“Google has verified that no other information has been received or accessed by Pokemon Go or Niantic”. Now, the game’s creators can see only your basic profile information.
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The app update was released for iOS on the App Store at the time of this writing, but was not available for Android on the Google Play store yet.
