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MoviePass Wants To Gather a Whole Lot of Data About Its Users (fortune.com)

Posted by msmash on from the too-much-confidence dept.

An anonymous reader writes: MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe thinks his service's rapid growth will continue, projecting earlier this month that MoviePass will have 5 million subscribers by the end of 2018, and account for around 20% of all movie ticket purchases. But some of those future subscribers might be concerned about his company's tactics, which Lowe recently said includes tracking users' location before and after a trip to the movies. Lowe's comments, originally reported by Media Play News, were made at the Entertainment Finance Forum on March 2 in Hollywood. They came during a panel titled "Data is the New Oil: How Will MoviePass Monetize It?" Lowe's answer to that question, in part, was that "our bigger vision is to build a night at the movies," including by guiding users to a meal before or after seeing a film.

Lowe said that was possible because "we get an enormous amount of information. Since we mail you the card, we know your home address . . . we know the makeup of that household, the kids, the age groups, the income. It's all based on where you live. It's not that we ask that. You can extrapolate that. "Then," Lowe continued, "Because you are being tracked in your GPS by the phone . . . we watch how you drive from home to the movies. We watch where you go afterwards, and so we know the movies you watch. We know all about you. We don't sell that data. What we do is we use that data to market film."

5 of 162 comments (clear)

  1. Share an account, so easy! by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Get a card sent to a P.O. Box, pay using a prepaid card. Put the app on a cheap secondary phone which doesn't even need service. Use the theater's WiFi to confirm you're there.

    That way, you can share an account (i.e. card + burner phone) among an entire family or group of neighbors and friends. Turn off the phone when not "in use" to turn off the tracking function.

    Suck on that, Mitchie-boy.

    1. Re:Share an account, so easy! by b0s0z0ku · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Meanwhile, I got very cheap movies for a month or two... and the next service will be there, ripe for the picking. The real losers? Wall St. investors -- and it's good when they lose out on services that steal customer data.

    2. Re:Share an account, so easy! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      And this is why we can't have nice things.

      Gotta find a scapegoat, eh?

      Of course MP tracks user data. THAT'S HOW THEY PAY FOR THE FUCKING TICKETS!!!!

      Too bad. Why don't you go have a cry in the corner, little boy.

      MP gives people hundreds of dollars of value

      No they don't.

      it's fuckers like this guy above that shits all over everything, drives them out of business, and ruins it for the rest of everyone else

      Nope, it's cheapskate, acquiescing shits like you that caused this fucking privacy and drip feed mess of spying, data collection/resale, security breaches, identity theft, DRM, DLC, microtransactions and wasted bandwidth from companies who want you reliant upon and streaming from their servers 24/7.

      If you don't want MP tracking some of your data, THEN DON'T SIGN UP FOR THE SERVICE. But stop fucking it up for everyone else.

      Nah, I think I'd rather fuck it up for you the same way you fucked everything up for the security/privacy conscious.

  2. Wanted feature in Mobile OS: by Alain+Williams · · Score: 3, Interesting

    run every app in its own container where I can specify what the external world looks like from within the container. So: GPS some location/track that I have chosen (regardless of the hardware GPS even being switched on), sound & camera virtual and maybe hearing/seeing some pre-recorded rubbish, contacts database - maybe unique to the container, ditto call log, ... Ie I want to control what the app perceives through the 'phones sensors.

  3. Another Reason Not to Own a Smart Phone by DERoss · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I do not own a smart phone. I do not even own a dumb phone. I can still order movie tickets from Fandango via my PC.

    No, I am not a Luddite. My entire 40+ year career was in computer software. I just do not have the need to be in constant contact 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.