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BlizzCon Makes Sure Attendees Have Phones This Year

Perhaps as a means of getting revenge against the backlash of last year’s Diablo disaster, news on BlizzCon’s official website has caused controversy as attendees are required to have phones for this year’s event.

The article states that in order to gain entry into the convention, attendees must have a special mobile app installed on their Android or iOS devices:

Following several hundred comments on the thread (with most of them being iterations of an infamous quote from the Diablo Immortal smartphone game reveal), a Blizzard Customer Support representative joined the discussion by suggesting attendees seek help from the event’s Solution Desk:

Another poster however made a rather vital discovery about the app, equating its functionality to that of spyware:

I did some searching around and found numerous articles about what the app takes, and who it sends it to. In short, the most thorough write-up I found in about 30 minutes of searching states that the app scrapes of ton of data from your phone, including your first and last name, precise location (as determined by GPS, WiFi, and other means), how often the app is used, what content is viewed using the app, which ads are clicked, what purchases are made (and not made), a user’s personal advertising identifier, IP address, operating system, device make and model, billing address, credit card number, security code, mailing address, phone number, and email address. It doesn’t say that it also takes your contacts but it would be trivial to do so. AXS’s privacy statement says that they share/sell the information with a LOT of other companies (more details in the article I linked).

Whatever the reason behind Blizzard’s sudden demand for fans to require smartphones to attend BlizzCon, some might see the decision as an initiative of the company to transition into smartphone game development, what with the decreasing popularity of nearly all its IPs.

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