The Motherfuckers At MoviePass Allegedly Changed Some Users Passwords Without Them Knowing In Order To Stop Them From Using The App

Yahoo- MoviePass is all but extinct (as of April 2019, the service reportedly had just over 200,000 subscribers left), and a new four-month investigation into the service published by Business Insider (via /Film) reveals some of the alleged unethical practices carried out by the fledgling company.

I think we all remember Moviepass, right? It was the service that allowed you to see a movie a day for the low low monthly price of less than one actual movie. People said it was too good to be true because most companies need to do things like “make money” or at least not hemorrhage it to be sustainable. But everyone jumped on board, got their little red card, and hammered down more movie theater popcorn than they had in the previous 5 years combined.

Then things started to go downhill as shady stuff started happening in the app that prevented people from being able to use it, which Business Insider did a great job detailing if you want to read the full article. They talk about how MoviePass would blackout blockbuster movies on opening weekend or set up a “trip wire” that would shut down MoviePass for the rest of the day once they hit a certain threshold of money spent in a day, which decreased significantly over time. To be honest, I feel like that stuff was pretty much common knowledge to the point I feel like MoviePass just announced it themselves because they didn’t give a fuck because it was common knowledge they were losing money quicker than Portnoy does during football season.

However, (allegedly) changing people’s passwords was something I never heard of until today.

One of the more shocking revelations is that MoviePass manually changed the passwords on accounts it found most active in order to prevent top subscribers from using the service. In an attempt to save money, MoviePass allegedly locked out some of its most active users so they wouldn’t be costing the company as much.

There isn’t a person on the World Wide Web that hasn’t been hit with an Incorrect Password message that quickly turns into an orgy of Incorrect Password messages. You put in your old faithful password to old faithful add a capital letter then you throw in a number followed by a symbol until you are trying every combination your simple brain that has been broken by the internet can muster before finally waving the white flag and clicking Forgot Password. If you want to swindle me out of exploiting a service I paid for, I get that. That’s just a capitalist doing some hardcore capitalism. But to make your customer go insane online by changing their password without telling is pretty much online torture in my mind. Digital waterboarding. If you want to save a buck, turn off my account for the day/week/month due to “maintenance” or put up a screen that literally tells me to go fuck myself.

But don’t change my password on me. We don’t have many codes of conduct on this fucked up network consisting mostly of porn and ridiculous viral videos. But outlawing any sort of tomfoolery with peoples’ passwords should be numbers 1, 2, and 3.