Niantic fixing issue with Pokemon GO giving full access to Google Accounts on iOS
A lot of talk has been going around today about Pokemon GO and Google accounts. Users discovered that if you sign up for the app on iOS, Pokemon GO is given full access to your account.
There’s no reason to be concerned though. Niantic said in a statement that this was nothing more than an error, and Pokemon 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.”
Niantic added that the company already worked on a client-side fix after detecting the error “to request permission for only basic Google profile information, in line with the data that we actually access.” Plans are in place for Google to reduce permissions “to only the basic profile data”, which will be done automatically.
Here’s the full statement from Niantic:
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. Once we became aware of this error, we began working on a client-side fix to request permission for only basic Google profile information, in line with the data that we actually access. Google has verified that no other information has been received or accessed by Pokémon GO or Niantic. 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.
