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MoviePass CEO Proudly Says App Tracks Your Location Before, After Movies (techcrunch.com)
MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe told an audience at a Hollywood event last Friday that the app tracks moviegoers' locations before and after each show they watch. "We get an enormous amount of information," Lowe said. "We watch how you drive from home to the movies. We watch where you go afterwards." His talk at the Entertainment Finance Forum was entitled "Data is the New Oil: How will MoviePass Monetize It?" TechCrunch reports: It's no secret that MoviePass is planning on making hay out of the data collected through its service. But what I imagined, and what I think most people imagined, was that it would be interesting next-generation data about ticket sales, movie browsing, A/B testing on promotions in the app and so on. I didn't imagine that the app would be tracking your location before you even left your home, and then follow you while you drive back or head out for a drink afterwards. Did you? It sure isn't in the company's privacy policy, which in relation to location tracking discloses only a "single request" when selecting a theater, which will "only be used as a means to develop, improve, and personalize the service." Which part of development requires them to track you before and after you see the movie? A MoviePass representative said in a statement to TechCrunch: "We are exploring utilizing location-based marketing as a way to help enhance the overall experience by creating more opportunities for our subscribers to enjoy all the various elements of a good movie night. We will not be selling the data that we gather. Rather, we will use it to better inform how to market potential customer benefits including discounts on transportation, coupons for nearby restaurants, and other similar opportunities."
XPrivacy user here...and by 'user', I mean 'multi-time donor' and 'will not buy a phone unless I know it can run Xprivacy'.
Xprivacy is excellent, but users must be aware of what they're getting into. If you use it just to deny location data from downloaded apps, you're probably fine. If you decide to set it so apps are unconditionally denied calendar and contact data, again, you're probably fine. However, Xprivacy can get you into trouble. It's the first thing I install, primarily because I use it to deny system apps access to various forms of data as well. I also have it set to prompt for other sorts of data, especially internet - Swype doesn't get internet access at all, for example. If you set it to prompt you, it will give you a number of UAC-style prompts when you first start the app. If you apply Xprivacy to system apps, you *will* spend ten minutes after your next reboot allowing and denying permissions to things, and doing so without being careful can get you stuck in a boot loop...ask me how I know this.
It takes time and dedication to make Xprivacy stabilize, but it's also pretty impressive how well it also acts as a de facto alert system. It's amazing how much Facebook Messenger hates it, especially when I deny it access to my contacts...which is why I use a combination of the mobile website and Frost instead. Similarly, it's almost scary going through the log of denied things, to see exactly how many times my location was requested from things which clearly didn't need it.
All in all, Xprivacy is why I'm still on Android - it's the only mobile OS with a tool like it. It does, however, require dedication and a willingness to put up with a less-smooth phone experience, but that's the cost of liberty.
< Location Services MoviePass
-- -- -- --
Allow location access:
Never
While using the App [x]
Always
Fixed that for you...