MoviePass CEO seeks to clarify app's tracking capabilities

MoviePass' CEO is trying to put to rest customer concerns raised by statements he made earlier this month about the location-tracking capabilities of his company's app.

During an on-stage interview at a conference in Los Angeles, CEO Mitch Lowe appeared to brag that his subscription service, which lets customers watch a movie per day in movie theaters for $9.95 a month, was actually watching its customers pretty closely.

"We get an enormous amount of information," Lowe said, according to the website Media Play News. "We watch how you drive from home to the movies. We watch where you go afterwards."

Lowe's comments seemed to touch off a wave of concern from press and subscribers who thought MoviePass might be overstepping its bounds. In a backtrack statement issued not long after the comments began to circulate, MoviePass explained it's "exploring" using location-based marketing.

Now Lowe says he was only "joking" at the conference and that his original comments "mischaracterized" the app's location-tracking feature. He said the app's location services operate only on an opt-in basis.

"MoviePass does not track and has never tracked or collected data on the location of our members at any point when the app is not active," Lowe said in the email to customers Monday. "In our recent update with Apple , we removed the background tracking capabilities. MoviePass does not use and has never used this feature."

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