The recently-released Pokémon Go has quickly emerged as a
cultural phenomenon, with legions of players using their phones to
"catch" Pokémon that emerge all around them,
visible (thankfully) only to players. While catching
Pokémon by phone is far less cumbersome than collecting
boxes upon boxes of Pokémon cards, as some of us did in the
early aughts, it does come with its own set of pitfalls.
Specifically, users have learned that Niantic, the maker of the
Pokémon Go application, was accidentally capturing a
worryingly high level of access to its users' private
information while those users were busy capturing
Pokémon.
As discovered by Adam Reeve, a principal architect at the analytics firm Red Owl, when a player used her
Google account to activate the pre-update iOS version of the
application, the application gained full access to that
player's Google account. Most applications request minimal account access. In this case,
however, the level of access requested by
