By now, if you haven’t given Pokemon Go a chance, then you’re lame. It’s the ultimate throwback and, yes, every 28 year old is indeed reliving their tazo Pokemon years.
While Nintendo’s company value has risen a ridiculous amount (some say $11 billion) since its release it does have glitches in every corner – from server issues to ending battles to not picking up your GPS coordinates and having way too many zubats in the city.
Due to this, the former Google startup Niantic has been able to gather a goldmine of information through the application. Already surpassing Twitter and Tinder for the amount of daily users (HERE) – WO-BAM – the company’s database has now become a delicious target for hackers, criminals, and corporations. Obviously.
On Android, the app asks for access to the user’s camera, contacts, GPS location, SD card contents and the sign-up process asks for date of birth. While this is the same with many other apps, Pokemon Go requires you to be connected to the cloud whenever you are playing – so it has to know where you are.
This means that it can follow your walking patterns and know exactly how long you spend in a certain place, collecting data like no other app ever before.
And, the worst of it is that Niantic’s Privacy Policy allows it to sell all this information to third parties, something the permission screen doesn’t let you know when you first sign up.
If hackers gain this information, they themselves could sell it on the black market, and who knows who will use it and for what.
Other information the app gives insight into are your emails and which URL you visited just before opening the app.
So what can you do? I have no idea. Let’s just hope that Niantic knows who it’s up against and, uses guys like NEWORDER to secure their information volts.
I’m still going to play the game. In fact, I have an incense going on for the next 30 minutes and I already attracted and bagged a Magmar.
[source: thedailybeast]
