Nintendo Switch

Oh Nintendo, you’re breaking our heart. We don’t want to give you our *Privacy Not Included warning label, we really don’t. You’ve been so good at privacy in the past. But your privacy policy raises some red flags for us and that makes us sad. (And hey, thank you for making your privacy policy easy to find and read and understand, we do appreciate that.)

First off, Nintendo does collect a fair amount of personal information. Things like name, email address, postal address, phone number, date of birth, country of residence, language, gender, device and advertising identifiers and other unique personal or online identifiers, location (with your consent), health information (with your consent), and lots of information about how and when and what games you play.

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. Which is pretty common, but still can be a bit of a concern as it’s been found to be pretty easy to re-identify some of this data, especially with location data.

Finally, it seems Nintendo doesn’t specifically say all users, regardless of where they live, have the same rights to access and delete their data, which is what we like to see. Right now they say, “Depending on your place of residence, you may have the right, in accordance with applicable law, to request access to, deletion, and portability of your information.” We believe it’s important for everyone to have the same right to access and delete data, regardless of the data privacy laws they live under. And we believe companies should grant that right, even when they aren’t required to by law. Here’s hoping Nintendo will change their privacy policy to fix this.

That’s the bad news with Nintendo. Now on to some good news. They do say that they do not, and will not, sell your data. That’s good. Too bad they do share it with third parties for advertising purposes. And they do a good job with parental controls on the Switch. So parents, make sure to set those up (here’s some help with that).

As for security, Nintendo did have a data breach in 2020 where 300,000 accounts were compromised and attackers gained access to users' personal information, including date of birth and email addresses. That's not great. And early in 2022, Nintendo had to ask users to stop using their Wi-Fi USB Connector due to security concerns.

So what’s the worst that could happen with your Nintendo Switch? Well, if you don’t set up two-factor authentication (please do this!), it’s possible someone could hack into your Nintendo account and buy a bunch of games at your expense. That could be costly and you don’t want that headache. Here’s hoping you set-up 2FA, lock down your Nintendo privacy settings and opt-out of as much data collection as you can, so you can sit back and enjoy some Mario Kart, Splatoon, or Sonic with your friends.