If you’ve been hearing rumours on the Internet grapevine that app sensation Pokémon Go had been asking for far too many permissions on iPhones, you’ve been hearing correctly.
This article is directed to people using the Pokémon Go app on a iOS (Apple) device and using their Google account to authorise the installation.
In fact users were largely baffled as to why the augmented reality app needed “full account access” when authorising the account to install from their Google accounts – permissions that would incidentally allow the app access to plenty of information stored on your account as well as the ability to perform certain actions on your Google account.
However…
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…worry not avid Pokémon Go hunters. App developers Niantic Labs are already on the issue, claiming the unnecessary permissions requested by their app was merely an “oversight”.
They stated…
“We recently discovered that the Pokémon Go account creation process on iOS erroneously requests full access permission for the user’s Google account. However, Pokémon Go only accesses basic Google profile information (specifically, your User ID and email address) and no other Google account information is or has been accessed or collected.”
And now they have already issues an update for the problem. Upon installing the update, the game now only has access to your name and email address.
The entire issue started a wave of rumours, including the claim that Pokémon Go is secretly reading your email (it never could, even before the update.) Other claims fail to mention the issue was relevant only to iOS users using their Google account to authorise. We are not aware of any similar privacy issues concerning Android users.