Nintendo Switch

The Switch’s popularity continues to soar years after the gaming console’s release. The games are great, the switching gimmick is still fun after all this time, and it’s one of the cheaper game systems on the market from a major company.

Unfortunately, Mozilla says it’s worried about recent changes to the device’s privacy policy. That’s a shame, as Nintendo is a company that’s historically been above average when it comes to privacy practices.

Cameras: Yes (Technically. There’s an infrared camera in the controller.)

Microphones: No

Location tracking: Yes

What data it collects: Name, age, gender, birthday, email, phone number, location data, health information, advertising ID numbers, data about your gaming

Can you delete the data: Mozilla says it’s not clear whether you can delete the data in all locations.

How the company uses the data: Advertising, sharing data with third parties, combining with data from third parties

Mozilla says:

“Nintendo also says they can ‘receive information about you from other sources, including from other users of our services, and third-party services and organizations.’ This worries us a bit because they say they can take this information they receive from third party sources and combine it with information they have about you and build an even bigger profile on you. And they say they can use that information to do things like offer you customized content, provide you with tailored advertising, and send you promotional materials from them or their affiliates and business partners (which could be a pretty good number of companies). So, Nintendo collects a good deal of personal information and says they can use and share that with third parties for targeted, interest-based advertising. None of this is great.

Nintendo also says they can aggregate or de-identify the personal information they collect on you and then that new de-identified data is no longer subject to their privacy policy and they can do pretty much whatever they want with it.”

Mozilla’s review:

https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/nintendo-switch/