Let's Learn: Scrutiny of movie ticket booking apps

Are you willing to give this level of access to an App on your smartphone just to book a movie ticket?

If you want to book a movie ticket to watch a show at the time of your convenience you would like to book the ticket from one of the apps on your smartphone. Right?

In the past when you went to watch a movie, there was an intrinsic air of anonymity in the movie watching experience.

That is how it should be. But wait, have you ever looked at the permissions your movie booking app makes you to agree to when you were installing it. Now look at permissions list of the most downloaded movie booking apps.

BookMyShow

You can read the details given on the permissions pop up on the App's page
under Additional Information > Permissions - view details

App's page of Book My Show

In Google's words

This app has access to:

Device & app history

read sensitive log data
retrieve running apps

Identity

find accounts on the device

Contacts

find accounts on the device
read your contacts

Location

approximate location (network-based)
precise location (GPS and network-based)

SMS

read your text messages (SMS or MMS)
receive text messages (SMS)
send SMS messages

Phone

read phone status and identity

Photos/Media/Files

modify or delete the contents of your USB storage
read the contents of your USB storage

Storage

modify or delete the contents of your USB storage
read the contents of your USB storage

Device ID & call information

read phone status and identity

Other

receive data from Internet
control vibration
run at startup
read Google service configuration
prevent device from sleeping
view network connections
full network access
send sticky broadcast

Let us look at one more popular app in this category

PVR

You can read the details given on the permissions pop up on the App's page
under Additional Information > Permissions - view details
This App asks for access to your smartphone's camera along with other permissions listed above.

Apps page of PVR Cinemas

Now as laymen let us the assume these apps need all these capabilities to function properly. Now I will list three other recently developed apps that are listed in the Google's play store in this category.

Movie Ticket Booking Apps that do not ask for any special permissions on your smartphones