At Niantic, we’ve designed tools to protect players from inappropriate or unwanted interactions. Utilizing these tools will help you control your experience across our games and apps. We encourage parents and guardians to spend time reviewing our safety tools, as well as your child or teen’s safety and privacy settings so that they can customize their Niantic experience.
We want kids and teens to feel safe and supported when using our products and services, so we provide tools designed to help them control their experience. The below articles include information on features such as blocking, muting, removing friends, and privacy protections across our games and apps.
Check out our Safety Best Practices for tips on keeping your account safe.
If you or someone you know is struggling with thoughts of suicide or self harm, help is available.
Use the contact information below to get help:
- United States: Call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 988, available 24/7 for support.
- Other Countries and Regions: Find a crisis resource near you by visiting the International Association for Suicide Prevention.
If you come across suicide or self harm content, you can report it to us and we’ll send the affected individual information on how to get support.
All our games are meant to be played outside as we encourage our users to step out and explore their communities. As with any other outdoor activity including hiking, biking, or playing sports in a park, all users should be aware of their surroundings.
While our games are meant to encourage movement and exercise, we encourage all players to keep their eyes away from their phone while walking. With any outdoor activity, parents and legal guardians should communicate safety precautions that are appropriate for their child’s or teen’s stage of development.
For parents and legal guardians with teens learning to drive: we have features designed to prevent playing our games while driving. Our apps detect when a player is moving at speeds that suggest driving and automatically disable gameplay to prevent interruptions and distractions while operating a vehicle. There are ways to limit distraction from other apps while driving: iOS can automatically enable do-not-disturb mode while driving and Android apps on the Google Play Store have similar functions.
Our games are populated with in-game locations created from historical sites, public artwork, user-submitted destinations, or sponsored business locations. They exist in many places, including trails, parks, and urban areas. The safety of any given area depends on the user, the time of day, and many other factors. We encourage you to use your judgment about which parts of your environment you feel safe with your children going to at various times of day.
It’s also possible for your child or teen to meet other users in the real world while they are visiting these in-game locations. As with many multiplayer games, certain gameplay elements will involve players teaming up with other players, for example while battling tougher Pokémon or larger Mushrooms. We recommend you guide and supervise your child or teen’s use of our products, including with whom they play.
Campfire is Niantic’s chat function and is only available for adults and children over the age of digital consent. These are tips and tools we share with all our users and you can discuss with your teen to enable them to have a safe experience on Campfire.
We recommend avoiding including personal information in your teen’s username, which may be visible publicly. While we do request the player’s date of birth at registration, that information remains private and doesn’t show up on the profile for others to see.
Sharing personal information is generally not recommended and not necessary to play our games. This applies to Campfire channels, group messages and private messages and includes sharing phone numbers, addresses, social media profiles, real names, date of birth (which don’t appear on profiles), age, etc. Any request for personal information or to move to another messaging platform is unnecessary to play our games.
Does your teen want to stop someone from contacting them? They have a few options:
- Unfriending: Remove the user as a Friend. To do so, go to the user’s profile, click the three dots on the top right corner and select Remove Friend.
- Blocking: By blocking a user, you ensure that they will not be able to message you or add you back as a Friend. You will not see notifications from them.
- Reporting: You can report inappropriate content or behavior for Niantic to review.
- Muting: You do not want to unfriend the user but solely to stop them from messaging you? You can mute the conversation and stay friends with them!