A new investigative report from Kotaku shows that Harry Potter: Wizards Unite likely collected data from users even when they weren’t playing the game.
Niantic, the game developer, reportedly saved around three location records per minute for the game. This is almost double the amount of records that it saved for Pokemon Go, according to the report.
Kotaku looked at 10 players’ location records, which included 25,000 different location records. In one instance, there was a location record kept for each hour of the day. This means that data was allegedly collected when the app was open in the background.
Niantic responded to Kotaku and stated that the data collection was due to an a bug in the Android version of the app. It confirmed that the bug has since been patched.
The developer has said that it outlines the data that it collects in its privacy policy. It also said that users can make a request to have the data deleted.
Kotaku reported that with the data collected, Niantic could be able to “discern individual patterns of user behavior as well as intimate details about a player’s life.”
Harry Potter: Wizards Unite launched in Canada on June 24th, and generated $1.1 million USD (approximately $1.4 million CAD) through player spending and nearly three million installs during its debut weekend.
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