Developer Niantic, behind the smash-hit game Pokémon GO, has said it never intended for its game to gain full access to Google accounts and that the app does not access user data beyond basic profile information, such as the user's ID and email address.
Niantic said in a statement:
“We recently discovered that the account creation process in Pokémon GO for iOS was—incorrectly—requesting full access to the user’s Google account. We immediately began working on a client-side solution to fix the issue.”
In the meantime, players can revoke full Pokémon GO access from their Google account by following these steps:
- Go to the Google account permission page and search for Pokémon GO.
- Select Pokémon GO Release and click where it says “REMOVE” to revoke full access from your account.
- Launch Pokémon GO on your device to confirm that it is still working.
This will immediately revoke the Pokémon GO app's access to your Google account, but it has a downside: users may lose their game data.
Another simpler approach is to use a fake Google account just for this purpose. That is, create a new Google account, with nothing in it, and use that account to log in to Pokémon GO, as well as other apps you may have some doubts about.
