It's worth noting that Niantic Labs (the folks who licensed Pokemon from Nintendo and made Pokemon Go) are actually owned by Google [0]. This is Google giving itself permission to do Google things. Dollars to doughnuts they tried to use some internal-only API because things kept falling over at pokemon.com. Is this a massive UX failure? Certainly. Is giving Google permission to access Google stuff a "Huge security risk"? No more than putting your stuff in Google's hands in the first place.
Niantic are also the folks behind Ingress, if you've heard of that.
Niantic are also the folks behind Ingress, if you've heard of that.
[0] Specifically, Alphabet owns a significant portion of Niantic, along with Nintendo: https://nianticlabs.com/blog/niantic-tpc-nintendo/ (they were previously wholly-owned by Google).