MoviePass to track slightly less of your personal data that it's still definitely going to track
Continuing its efforts to set off the “too good to be true” instincts of the entire American movie-going public, discount ticket subscription service MoviePass has announced that it’ll be slightly dialing back the extensive data collection it does as a normal part of its ever-nebulous business model. According to Variety, the company—which made headlines last week when its CEO, Mitch Lowe, boasted about just how much info the bargain-priced ticket re-seller snags from its users at an industry conference—has pledged to shut off some “unused” bits of its location-tracking code.
It’s not clear which features, exactly, the company has given up the ability to use; we have to assume that they’re still using GPS to track users on the drive to and from the theater, as well as at the cinema itself. That kind of covers everything, as far as we know, unless the company was also planning on keeping tabs on our mid-movie bathroom trips, the better to pipe targeted ads directly into the stall as we race to avoid any of the good bits of our chosen film.
MoviePass recently claimed that it’s currently responsible for 6 percent of all ticket purchases in the U.S. The company was bought last year—not long before its monumental price drop down to $9.95 a month—by data analysis firm Helios & Matheson Analytics, who’ve never been shy about admitting that they see the company’s subscriber base as a treasure trove of targeted advertising info.