It was 100% expected that you would have no cell signal the entire event and we built in as many mitigations as we could think of.
This was 2013ish, I think there are a lot more mesh network devices that can relay signal nowadays but I'm not involved anymore in that stuff.
It was the best on-call I've ever had because.. nobody had cell signal while the event was on to complain about something.
This person complains that people didn't have network access on their phones when they were at the gate. I can only assume that they waited till they were at the gate to install/use the app so it never got its offline data.
Always open your event apps before getting to the event. Sometimes they're completely bare bones and have to reach out and pull that apps specific database so its sure you have the latest. Most of the event apps are a template that is modified for each event and just has different assets/sqlite.
Great. So an app can plug my IP address into a geolocation query, and might ultimately determine that I'm somewhere in $city. Or maybe the next city over. Or maybe half a continent away.
But sure, this "works" without consent, since there is no extra step to enable networking for an app.
> nearby wifi networks
This doesn't work without consent.
> camera footage
This doesn't work without consent.
Web apps can also get the rest if you click accept when it asks for camera access. What exactly do you lose by installing an app?
Data Linked To You:
Purchases, Location, Search History, Usage Data, Financial Info, Contact Info, Identifiers, Sensitive Info.
Nope Nope Nope.
The same applies if you use their website. It'll still ask for that info with a web form.
...is not installed on any of my devices
Insular is an app that lets you create and manage one of these profiles on the device itself: https://gitlab.com/secure-system/Insular
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/31/business/ticketmaster-hac...
You do know that apps can record data in the background, right?
A website is also sandboxed by your browser in a much stricter manner than an app is on your phone, at least by default.
I don't have specific information on the Ticketmaster app here, but to say that an app is the same as website from a tracking perspective on a phone is absurd.
Perhaps you'd like to re-frame your comment or ask a different question?
So your position is that an app installed on my phone is not able to track or collect any more data, and does not have access to any other information, than a website that I load in my device browser (assuming I log into that website with the same credentials I use in the native app)?
I agree that this might be true in some cases. Note that I never said or implied that an app could do things without permission - but my fault if that wasn't clear.
Now, that said, would it perhaps be fair to say that the average user is much more likely to grant additional permissions to a native app on their phone than they would to a website?
If a website asks for your location, or access to the camera or to your contacts or whatever, I think many people would refuse. There's still a sense that a website is "out there" on the Internet, and you shouldn't necessarily trust it.
But when an app you've installed on your device asks for these things, in order to "operate properly" or provide functionality, then I think people are much more likely to grant it.
After all they've installed the app on their device, they've already trusted the vendor that much, it's only an incremental step at this point.
And once the device does have this elevated access, and access to more data, then there are absolutely more opportunities to collect data on users without their understanding.
I say "understanding" here rather than "consent" because typically consent is given via some long and complicated T&Cs that no one reads. Which is of course on the user, but again if you don't grant permission in the first place (because you're on a website not an app), it's not a problem.
And we have historically seen that some companies (not all companies of course) take advantage of this app access to collect data for themselves without your knowledge. I hope that part isn't up for debate here..
I have enough confidence in the sandbox that "installing an app" is basically never an issue (though I don't out of the principle that most things companies have apps for just shouldn't be apps).
I don't know the worst, but juice is not worth the squeeze in my opinion. If you recall, Ticketmaster was just recently hacked, so the worst pretty much happened in that any data they had collected on their users is potentially been leaked. So if they can't protect that data, then I'm not participating in giving them data.
There's also the chance the ticketmaster app won't work properly later even if you did do it. I've had other apps shit the bed for no apparent reason in offline mode before. I add them to my wallet now just in case.
To be fair though I always get at least somewhat reasonable concert prices by doing presale. Sign up for the artist’s “presale club” and/or get the credit cards that have presale as a perk. Get in queue ahead of time. You won’t have to deal with the dynamic pricing/public sale shenanigans that we hear about. On Reddit I often see people complaining about paying at least 2x what I paid for similar tickets.