MoviePass CEO Mitch Lowe told TechCrunch that he actually mischaracterized MoviePass’s collection of location data last week at the Entertainment Finance Forum in Los Angeles. During his keynote at the conference, Lowe said:
“We get an enormous amount of information. We watch how you drive from home to the movies. We watch where you go afterwards.”
This understandably led to many users fearing MoviePass was tracking their every move. But after the growing outrage, Lowe has now said he misspoke, telling TechCrunch:
“Sometimes I get all excited about our future vision of a night at the movies and building an ecosystem around it. I need to correct what I said. The way I portrayed what we do is not accurate. I implied we know where you are when you’re on the way to the movies, and that’s not what we do.”
Lowe says the only time the MoviePass app actually knows a user’s location is when they open the app to find theaters around them or when they check in to make sure they are at the right theater for where they purchased their tickets.
“We only know where they are at that instant. Once they go out of the app, we don’t know where they are. We don’t know where they go afterwards, we don’t record it. That’s all we do, that’s all we’ve ever done.”
Lowe has also written an open letter to users explaining his mischaracterizations.
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