MoviePass is Tracking your Location for “Marketing Purposes”

Mitch Lowe, CEO of MoviePass has publicly claimed that his service tracks its users’ locations. Now everyone is seeking an explanation from the theater subscription service’s privacy policy. Lowe told an audience at a Hollywood event, “We watch how you drive from home to the movies. We watch where you go afterward.”

Once the comment was out, a spokesperson for the company clarified that MoviePass has no intentions to sell this data. The spokesperson said that the company is only “exploring” location-based marketing to “enhance the overall experience by creating more opportunities” for subscribers to “enjoy all the various elements of a good movie night.”

Controversial

In the company’s privacy policy, the use of location-based data is mentioned only once. It said that the user’s location is checked only to confirm if he/she is really near the specified theater from where they want to purchase the movie ticket from. Many had speculated that MoviePass would use this data to know more about ticket sales, movie browsing, A/B testing on promotions in the app, and so on.

It was too good to be true when MoviePass was launched as a subscription-based movie ticketing service, where users could subscribe to a single movie ticket per day for a flat subscription fee per month. Now, with a controversial statement from the CEO himself, users are beginning to wonder what else the app might be tracking.