Mobile Gaming Company Privacy Practices

My husband worked for a very large mobile gaming company, and these are the craziest things he ever told me.

For context, this company had a bunch of games, but the games he worked on specifically were slot machines.

Not real slot machines. Fake ones on your phone where you cannot win any money.

You can spend money. You only get a few coins per day for free. After that, you have to buy them.

The top monthly spender on the app spent on average $125,000 per month.

There were about 25 players that they considered high rollers up in this category, and from those 25, they made about $2 million.

per month on average. These players were treated like total VIPs. They had a dedicated phone line

that could call 24 hours for customer service. They would be invited to all expenses paid trips

and events. If their device was like out of date for the app and they couldn't play anymore,

the company would just send them a new iPad. Now talk about data tracking. They track the

days of the month that you got your direct deposit, your paycheck.

and they would send push notifications and targeted ads on those days to get you to buy coins.

They would estimate the value of your home, and the way they did that was by looking at your wifi signal

and depending on how strong the signal was, they would know how far you walked from where the router is in your house

and they could estimate the square footage of your house from that, compare that to your general location data,

and guess how much your house is worth.

And then they would sell you coin packs based on how much money they thought you had.

And this will come as a surprise to no one, but wins and losses are not random.

Right after you buy coins, you would win more.

you would get bonuses, jackpots, you'd be winning, and then they would slowly taper it down

and then they would plummet it to take all your coins back so you'd have to buy more

and they called this addiction tracking. This is wild that this is true. So basically what happens

is mobile apps get access to your wi-fi signal strength and then as you move around your

as you move around your home with your phone,

your phone logs that signal strength and your apps have access to this information.

So, then the apps get an idea of your floor plan, your home footprint, about how big your

room sizes are, and then they cross-reference that with publicly available real estate data

and zip code averages, and then they can estimate how big your home is and what your home is

worth.

And then get a load of this.

Apps don't directly have access to your bank account deposits, but they do have access

to things like your GPS, so what they'll do is they'll monitor you, where you go, and

they'll see if you're spending time near ATMs or banks.

And if it's around the time that people typically get paid, then they can confirm that you're

getting your paycheck on those dates.

This is such an invasion of privacy and not what you sign up for when you download the

app.