That fact has been complained about and has been fixed from Niantic's side. They now ask for a lot less permissions. Now it's basically the same as all other services using Google to sign in. But yeah, they might have a cooporation, but in the end, we will get a better map service! I wrote earlier that Niantic is actually an internal startup from Google, so they probably had some bigger thoughts about what to achieve from Ingress and now this app. I wrote it here: https://steemit.com/pokemon-go/@vongohren/how-pokemon-go-became-so-popular