The Ballpark app requires a ton of personal information, way more than I expected. To wit: Full name, Email address, Password, Street address, Telephone number(s), Birth date, Payment data, IP addresses, Location data, Contacts (as stored in your wireless device), Demographic data, Device data, Usage data, Voice recordings, Audiovisual recordings, Information about your interests and preferences, Data specifically requested in relation to an activity or an event (e.g., emergency contact information), Data provided by Other Companies if you choose to connect your use of our services through the Other Company’s service, Personal information of a child if and only if a parent or guardian provides the child’s personal information; and
- Sensitive personal information*.
This is all required in order to go to a game, all tickets are distributed through the app. There are workarounds, I said I don’t have a smartphone, and they allowed it using an mlb.com account. It’s tedious. Perhaps this is an indication of what our future looks like, it becomes increasingly difficult to navigate modern life without giving up all your data to prying apps, corporations and data brokers. This is just to go to a game, there’s no opportunity to print out tickets, show a generated QR code, bar code, nothing. You must have the app to attend a game.
Considering the baseball audience skews older, you’d think they’re losing a fair number of ticket sales to people who can’t get their flip-phone on the Interdoodads.
The entire ad/privacy-invasion economy screams “tail wagging the dog” at this point.
I’m at the ball park now, presented tickets through the web app mlb.com The most I had to give up was my name. I’m more incredulous that people don’t look up privacy policies and have no clue about this. Everyone had the app, I was definitely an outlier. My wife even has it, but understands why I wouldn’t.
While privacy is a big deal, the other issue is locking out nontechnical people.
My father can’t even work a touch-screen phone, so I guess his money’s no good.
Thank you for this. I actually have this installed and a little bit ashamed of myself for blindly installing. Can’t undo the damage, but can uninstall and not do additional.
