Let me be clear – Pokemon Go and Niantic can now:
- Read all your email
- Send email as you
- Access all your Google drive documents (including deleting them)
- Look at your search history and your Maps navigation history
- Access any private photos you may store in Google Photos
- And a whole lot more
What’s more, given the use of email as an authentication mechanism (think “Forgot password” links) they now have a pretty good chance of gaining access to your accounts on other sites too.
This only applies to iOS, so Android users seem to have nothing to worry about. The fault lies with Niantic, so let’s hope they fix it soon.
…completely dumb. Proceed to vote me down and out of existence.
Edited 2016-07-11 20:14 UTC
They’ll apologize, give everyone some free XP and this will be forgotten.
Waiting for the next scare…
As if it weren’t bad enough that millions of mindless zombies sit around playing candy crush for half the day, now they’re out running around in public, noses glued to their phones, hunting for Pokemon treasures. Ridiculous!! I swear, the older I get the dumber and more gullible the general public seems to get. People had better wake up soon and get wise to all of these useless distractions that have been designed to keep people from noticing that the foxes are making off with the hens.
Edited 2016-07-11 21:32 UTC
And the worst part is, those kids keep getting on your damn lawn!
I actually went Pokémon hunting yesterday. With some friends.
And, there were a ton of people also doing the same, and we met some of them. It was a fun, social experience.
With all of you glued to your phones? Oh I’m sure it was a fun “social” experience…. Simply being WITH other people is not the same as socializing with other people. Sorry.
Well, considering that we were, you know, talking to each other, and to the people we met, yeah, it was a social experience.
Yeah! How dare people do a thing?!
No, they’d be much better off if they spent their time following your prescribed program of what is acceptable; spending their time posting eye-rolling crap on OSNews, for example. That’s clearly a much better use of their time.
So edgy.
Apparently, if you already have a Niantic game installed and linked to your Google account, Pokémon will use the existing auth token, and won’t get full access to your Google account.
I figured as much; I have had Ingress on my iPhone since I got the phone, and the other day I installed Pokemon Go just to see how alike/different they are. I saw this article soon after and checked, my permissions are normal. Go only has access to my account name and the name of (but no rights to) my email address.
Also, they are fixing it both on Niantic/Pokemon Company’s end and Google’s end:
https://support.pokemongo.nianticlabs.com/hc/en-us/articles/22264840…
http://www.infowars.com/pokemon-go-linked-to-cia/
http://gizmodo.com/can-pokemon-go-really-read-all-your-emails-17834…
Short version: No, it can’t. No, it doesn’t. The researcher who claimed it did, isn’t certain he’s right, and did no testing.
People who did *actual* testing weren’t able to access gmail with the poketoken (not my word, thank god).