Option to Disable Niantic Social
Is there a way to disable Niantic Social. I hate that all my pokemon friends(many whom I barely know) now have access to my ingress id. This is information I should be allowed to share or not share as I choose. I think this is a huge privacy concern that urgently needs to be addressed.
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pokemon friends
I barely know
How ironic.
I agree on the topic though, Niantic Social should be opt-in.
A new way to throw away a BAF operation!
And they didn't even make it optional!
Privacy? Who cares!
Please, Niantic, roll back this feature until we can disable it. Heck, you didn't even ask the user!
I'm curious... how would this impact OPSEC? Genuine question.
Yes, it might be a rare case, but if you can see who is online at a given time, you can "guess" an operation. Several comms apps request access to your contact list and then show your online status. If you don't pay attention, your online status combined with your teammates online status can reveal that an ongoing OP.
I myself have been able to guess the the plan just from 2 portal alerts and a portal capture, so it might be a rare scenario, but possible.
Did I fulfill your couriosity? :)
Why do you think opsec usually involves making no actions that make you identifiable on COMM? Ingress is perhaps the one game where it's easy to broadcast your location with a portal capture.
C’mon Niantic. Think this through.
Ingress is a factional competitive game of strategy and tactics where keeping your presence somewhere secret til you act can be critical.
Pokemon Go is a very different beast and more sociable and your presence on stops, with lures is largely irrelevant
Using different IDs in the two games allowed me to productively play PoGo while waiting quietly to do something in Ingress without giving away my presence to any but the most astute and lucky observers.
Niantic breaking down this wall is unhelpful and will Inevitably result in me playing both games less.
Also, using the PoGo distance walked and not the max of that and the Ingress distance? Bit rubbish.
Also is there a way to remove my account from the wand-wagglers game without harming my Ingress and PoGo standings? I want nothing to do with JKRowling stuff at this point.
I don't see anywhere that your location is revealed when you have your game presence set to "online". Or even offline. You reveal your presence by actions on the map. So not sure how this would breach OPSEC.
I do agree though that it should be opt-in per platform.
@cmaxxen I believe you can request your HPWU account be removed without affecting your other games.
I've heard of people planning to change their email for different games just to keep things separate.
Remembering all the issues with authentication regarding Mission Creator Tool, OPR, Community ... I think I'll hold off. Besides, my IGN is the same across all games.
Does turning off "Let my Friends see info about the last time I played Niantic Games" help for those concerned with OpSec? Also, maybe don't try to take over that gym when you're waiting for an op to start.
If you share multiple games on one email address, changing one will affect all the others as well. You can't separate them if they've been created on the same email/FB
Oh, meaning if I associate PoGo with FB, all other games would also be associated with FB automatically?
If all your other games were linked to the same email account, yes, as I understand it.
Thank you. Looking for table to flip, brb...
I'm seeing a checkbox whether or not to share my online status with my friends, so tick that off and no problem on the BAF situation?
On looking at it, I only see myself having access to when I last played. In that version of it, it doesn't seem to have opsec issues.
If you're that worried then maybe you shouldn't have friends that you don't know?
The only opsec issue I can think of is:
I recall once we were at a restaurant intending to farm after dinner. Everyone was good with opsec, but a few players took over a gym, which alerted an opposition player who happened to be there for dinner with his family. So everyone was surprised when we started building and immediately got attack notifications. He was nice about it, we said hi, had a laugh over it, and he let us farm in peace.
Niantic, please add the ability to completely opt out of the Niantic Social feature. It's really not cool to start sharing information that people thought was private. Previously it was safe to add lots of folks as pogo or wizard friends without having to worry about whether they were on the opposite faction. Even without Ingress information specifically being shared, what if you used a different trainer name but happened to use your Ingress agent name when you were experimenting with wizards? Now suddenly those pogo folks you friended a little while back realize that you are the one who took down the anchor for their BAF. I know not everyone cares about this but it seems like super bad policy to start sharing info that people previously thought was private. It makes you wonder what Niantic will suddenly start sharing in the future?
I’m appalled, and I haven’t played PoGo since the beta.
Niantic. As I have not opted'in for any between-NIA game sharing information, you specifically do not have my permission to provide, what I thought was completely private until now, information about my status in other NIA games I might also be playing with you. Cease and desist in this practice immediately, please; i.e., opt me out NOW. I'd be happy to consider certain opt-ins in the future, but to do this without telling me or asking for my permission is unacceptable. All my NIA game playing activity is considered to me to be private between NIA and the other fiends I choose to share within those specific single games. No cross-game sharing is tolerated at this time. STOP STOP STOP
Linking accounts in this way is like getting a really awesome surprise present except that it's exactly the opposite in every possible way. I too would like to be able to opt in or out of this feature on a per-game basis, and the default should be opt out. I want to be able to avoid the privacy leak before you force it on me.
I know y'all aren't very good at thinking through the user experience of your features, so let us help you. Please turn this off until you can address people's privacy concerns. And please, we beg of you, never pull another stunt like this again.
I'm looking forward for this feature to become available in Ingress, let's check who plays PoGo while claiming the don't 😋
#sarcasm
On my Social page it doesn't even show the correct days that I last played on all three of the games and I've switched off the online toggle so I don't think it can accidentally give any opsec info useful for Ingress.
I'd say the only chance for an OpSec leak is for the feature to show online live status. It hasn't been clarified how does the feature work, but if this is not how it works then perhaps there is no risk.
Still, I don't like the idea of friends having access to my last login, some people get really nuts if you don't open up their presents daily!
It would be best to just make it optional, just like Ingress agent profile.
Actually not ironic.
Niantic incentivized having 200 random people send you gifts. By making 101 people your "Best Friend", you can level from 1 to 40. So the Social aspect of Niantic Social is already counter productive.
Hi everyone, thanks for reporting this. We've shared an update on displaying your Ingress codename to your Pokémon GO Friends via your Niantic Profile here: https://community.ingress.com/en/discussion/11494/ingress-codename-on-your-niantic-profile
In the meantime, you will not see your Ingress codename or Level, and Ingress will be listed in the "Other Niantic Games to Share" section.
Thank you @NianticBrian for the quick response!
I hope this will be opt-in for all games.
Right... It's always a game of shielding multi-accounters.
The few hours that it was up showed us who was using multiple account and who was using DeFit.
Could it please be made to disable showing which games you play on a game by game basis?
Even if it doesn't show my Ingress Tag on there showing that I play Ingress at all will create more problems than you can imagine for me do to the toxicity in our area. You're endangering players by doing this. All it would take is one random PoGo friend who doesn't understand the complexity of Ingress sharing a Screenshot of my Niantic Social page showing I play Ingress at all & then suddenly all my work to keept seperate IDs & play each game in different areas at different times will be for nothing.
What I just don't want to share friends between games? Is not just a matter of backpacks.
Besides, to reveal backpacks you would require to have several PoGO accounts to the same friend and then this friend would need to tell someone on Ingress about that. And it would still mean nothing since so many people justified that backpack already for its public use!
Does Niantic have the necessary to reveal suspicious activities? We have all seen that yes they do! So why don't they take actions? I'd answer the question with another question: have they ever taken any actions against multiaccs?
Some say they have, but I've been playing several years already and haven't ever witnessed a single ban for multiaccounting.