Over on Apple devices, the game was downloaded more times in its first week than any app that came before it.

The suddenly vast scale of Pokemon Go adoption is matched by the game's aggressive use of personal information. Unlike, say, Twitter, Facebook, or Netflix, the app requires uninterrupted use of your location and camera — a "trove of sensitive user data," as one privacy watchdog put it in a concerned letter to federal regulators.

All the more alarming, then, that Pokemon Go is run by a man whose team literally drove one of the greatest privacy debacles of the internet era, in which Google vehicles, in the course of photographing neighborhoods for the Street View feature of the company's online maps, secretly copied digital traffic from home networks, scooping up passwords, email messages, medical records, financial information, and audio and video files.