Blizzard places BlizzCon ticket system in the hands of data collection company bedrijf

Visitors to the annual BlizzCon trade show, for all things Blizzard games, will need to install an application this year to serve as their ticket. However, this app appears to do extensive data collection.

The app in question is AXS tickets. It offers a platform for buying, selling, forwarding to contacts and displaying tickets for events. The card that the app shows is a QR code that changes at fixed intervals. Blizzard states that this is to combat ticket fraud.

However, several people have delved into the application’s permissions and privacy policy. This shows that the app does more than just handle digital tickets, which the screenshots make. The app collects names, location history, in-app usage, ads clicked, purchase history, IP address, OS, device ID, physical addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and more. According to the privacy agreement, AXS shares this information with “current or future business partners, subsidiaries and parent companies”.

In the Play Store it can be seen that the application indeed requests access to contacts, location, bluetooth and wifi. Access to bluetooth allows users to be tracked with bluetooth beacon tracking. Also, the app starts up when Android starts up, which means that it can basically always run in the background.

If users are unable to access the app due to a dead battery or other problem, Blizzard says they can go to the help desk. However, the game maker does not say what solution they can be offered there.

In the Google Play Store, the app mostly gets a star in the ratings. Strikingly enough, it is the other way around on the App Store: there the app gets an average of 4.6 stars.

BlizzCon takes place on November 1 and 2 and tickets went on sale on May 4. The second batch of tickets will be on sale on May 8.