Is NetPass safe to use?

I a week or two ago, I was looking through Universal Updater and found Netpass. The description of what it does seemed nice to me, so I downloaded it, but left it unused for a bit because I wanted to finish setting up a theme and then forgot about it.

A few days later, after connecting to pretendo, i got a notification about streetpass relay, which i thought was referring to netpass and I was remembering the name wrong or something. I read that it only allows to have connections with people in the friends list for “security reasons”.

Some days later, I decided to open netpass for the first time -still thinking it’s the same-, just to look around because I had no one in my friends list and… i got around 7 streetpasses.

I looked around a bit more and found out they are different things, and what confuses me is how relay says it’s unsafe to streetpass with strangers, while netpass encourages that. And on top of that, I think i have seen people on juxt asking others to join a netpass room for tomodachi life

So… is netpass (relatively) safe to use? What’s the worst-case scenario that would happen if someone had bad intentions? And if this is a game-by-game thing… is there a list of what games are not affected somewhere?

Yes Netpass is safe, as a general rule.

From the Pretendo Discord server:

Why can I only tag with my friends?,
StreetPass data is not validated well when it is parsed. This can lead to exploits, which is why you are limited to passing with friends. Only friend users that you trust!

So it’s more of a “just in case” kind of thing that Pretendo has it for friends only.

Netpass has no such restrictions. So while it is technically more vulnerable to the average user, there really is no danger.

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