Harry Potter game Wizards Unite collected too much location data in the background

Niantic has been collecting too much location data from players of Harry Potter: Wizards Unite for some time. The creator sometimes requested the location of a player thirteen times a minute. That sometimes happened in the background. According to Niantic, this was due to a bug.

This is evident from data that Kotaku received from players who had made a data access request to Niantic. In total, the website analyzed 25,000 location data from ten players. They played both Pokémon Go and the newer game Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. In both ar games, players can move through the real world based on the location data on their phone. With Harry Potter: Wizards Unite, more than twice as much data would be sent to Niantic as with Pokémon Go.

The number of times data data was collected varies by player. Harry Potter: Wizards Unite would send the player’s location an average of three times per minute. One player involved 2304 location data in five days. From another player, Niantic requested location data throughout the day. This happened at least once an hour, even at night. That would indicate that in some cases the game is requesting data when the player is not actively playing. Niantic tells Kotaku that this was due to a bug in the Android version of the game. That bug would send the location if the app was still open in the background. According to Niantic, the bug has since been fixed.