PokémonGo and Your Privacy: What You Need to Know

PokémonGo’s app was recently updated — even though its first release was only in July of this year — due to the fact that the original app poses some significant privacy concerns for users.  The chief privacy concern is that the app requests and receives full access to the Google accounts of users who login to it. In the updated version of the app, which users are being encouraged to download, the app and game developers only have access to the user’s basic account information.

Privacy Concerns and PokémonGo

Before the recent update to the PokémonGo app, users who logged in to the game with Google were required to give full access to their Google account. This allowed the app to have access to a large amount of users’ personal information. The app could access a user’s Gmail, important documents, and other personal data that they had stored in their Google account. For this reason, the initial version of the PokémonGo app posed a significant security risk factor.

Read More: Olympians Couldn’t Play Pokémon GO and They Were Pretty Upset

PokémonGo Makes a Change

The good news for users of this popular game is that along with addressing security concerns in the new version of PokémonGo, the company has provided assurance that they never actually collected or stored significant amounts of private data about its users. The makers contend, and outside sources verify, that the initial account access request was a mere error that the Niantic team never exploited for any sinister purposes.

The app did, however, track the location of the devices upon which the game was played, as well as track recently viewed webpages from the user’s browsing history. Much of this information was collected simply to enhance the user’s enjoyment of the game by allowing the game to place its creatures in real-world locations that the user would encounter.

In order to eliminate the previously discussed privacy concern completely, users of the PokémonGo game are advised to logout of their Google account and download the updated version of the app. After downloading the newer version of the app, users are encouraged to go into their Google account’s ‘Privacy and Security’ settings and check their ‘Connected Apps and Sites’ to ensure that the app no longer has full access to the account.

PSafe Total can enhance a user’s security even further with its anti-virus software that combats attacks on the user’s Android device by malicious online threats.