How to Revoke Pokémon Go Extended Permissions for Your Google Account
Everyone loves Pokémon Go , but if you care about privacy on iOS, you might not like the fact that Pokémon Go (and Ingress , for that matter) has full access to everything in your Google account . Good news: you can revoke this access.
First of all, if you’re not overly into the game, or just getting started, perhaps now is the perfect time to create a new, fresh Google account just for Pokémon Go if you prefer to play and avoid all of this still-developing fiasco.
Here’s the problem: Pokemon Go requires ” full account access ” when you log into your Google account. This means that Niantic, the company behind Pokémon Go , has access to everything in your Google account, including Gmail, contacts, files stored in Google Drive, and has read / write permissions for it all, and also to almost all other data bits. from your password. This is the level of access usually reserved for Google’s own apps (note, Niantic used to be a Google company before it was spun off on its own last year). Here’s how to revoke it:
- Go to your Google security page and search for Pokémon Go like in the screenshot above.
- Select Pokémon Go and click Remove to revoke full access.
- Launch the game on your device and check if it still works.
The game still works fine in my limited tests, but we’ve seen mixed reports that some people can’t play without it (or can get into the game without it), so your mileage may vary.
Obviously, there is nothing to suggest that Niantic is collecting this data for malicious purposes or even to sell your data, but given that they are not explicitly asking you to do this on iOS, this is a bit surprising. However, Android users are explicitly asked to allow this access.
Update: Niantic has released a statement claiming that the permission request was erroneous. Here’s what they sent to our friends at Kotaku :
We recently discovered that the process of creating a Pokémon GO account on iOS incorrectly asks for full access permission to a Google user account. However, Pokémon GO only has access to basic Google profile information (specifically your user ID and email address) and no other Google account information is used or collected. As soon as we became aware of this error, we began work on a client-side fix to request permission only for basic Google profile information according to the data we actually access. Google has confirmed that Pokémon GO or Niantic did not receive or use any other information. Soon, Google will reduce Pokémon GO permission to basic profile data that Pokémon GO needs, so users won’t have to take any action on their own.
So hold on tight, it looks like a fix is coming. Update: A fix is available now .
Google Security | via Adam Riva and SecuriTAY