Live data from Hacker News

How Airlines don’t care about privacy: Case Study Emirates.com

medium.com

1–10 of 177 posts

Re: How Airlines don’t care about privacy: Case Study Emirates.com

#2
Yet another reason blocking ads is a must. But not just blocking ads, trackers as well. I use uMatrix and uBlock origin. Unfortunately this does nothing to deal with the aforementioned redirect chain. I suppose maybe this means it is time to go back to the telephone and flight agencies.

Re: How Airlines don’t care about privacy: Case Study Emirates.com

#3
Its funny to be reading this just a week after noticing this.

Every airline uses some sort of a contractor or a shared piece of software for online checkins. You can tell by the formed URI fragments and the JSON being sent back and forth.

Its all trash. I wanted to work on a business that unified all check-ins under single company. I do not think however, it is reasonable given that all of these airlines have the process, as shit as it is, for a reason.

Re: How Airlines don’t care about privacy: Case Study Emirates.com

#4
Nothing will happen until a malicious party ends up cancelling an entire flight’s worth of passengers and it starts costing them serious money and reputation.

It’s a sad state of affairs when there is no ethical way to correct certain grossly unethical business practices.

Re: How Airlines don’t care about privacy: Case Study Emirates.com

#5
post #2

Yet another reason blocking ads is a must. But not just blocking ads, trackers as well. I use uMatrix and uBlock origin. Unfortunately this does nothing to deal with the aforementioned redirect chain. I suppose maybe this means it is time to go back to the telephone and flight agencies.

Some of the tracking protection tools might help, but not all for exactly the reasons you mentioned. However, you can enforce some settings in Firefox and Firefox based browsers to control referrer leakage in control. But it does break few websites. I can recommend taking a look at : https://wiki.mozilla.org/Security/Referrer and see what suits your need.

Re: How Airlines don’t care about privacy: Case Study Emirates.com

#6
Airlines don't care about privacy, security, user experience, prices... There are many things you don't have to care about when competition is low and barriers to entry are incredibly high.

As an aside, turns out 9/10 decoy bombs and bladed weapons are smuggled onboard with no problems in tests. All the security theatre and voodoo rituals requiring passengers to switch off all electronic devices for no actual reasons and it's still trivial to hijack a plane.

Re: How Airlines don’t care about privacy: Case Study Emirates.com

#7
post #3

Its funny to be reading this just a week after noticing this. Every airline uses some sort of a contractor or a shared piece of software for online checkins. You can tell by the formed URI fragments and the JSON being sent back and forth. Its all trash. I wanted to work on a business that unified all check-ins under single company. I do not think however, it is reasonable given that all of these airlines have the pro…

I hear you, the problem is deeply rooted, in the implementation design. Even reporting these problems is such a tedious task, that you kind of feel like giving up after a certain point.

Unfortunately, not just Emirates, but a huge number of e-commerce companies across industries like travel, shopping, healthcare are subjected to similar leaks.

Re: How Airlines don’t care about privacy: Case Study Emirates.com

#8
post #2

Yet another reason blocking ads is a must. But not just blocking ads, trackers as well. I use uMatrix and uBlock origin. Unfortunately this does nothing to deal with the aforementioned redirect chain. I suppose maybe this means it is time to go back to the telephone and flight agencies.

There is really no way out of the redirect chain here, but if you want to avoid malicious redirects on many other websites you can use the Neat URL extension.

Re: How Airlines don’t care about privacy: Case Study Emirates.com

#10

Nothing will happen until a malicious party ends up cancelling an entire flight’s worth of passengers and it starts costing them serious money and reputation. It’s a sad state of affairs when there is no ethical way to correct certain grossly unethical business practices.

Absolutely agree, data security is a not a priority for almost all organizations in Service Industry. Hopefully GDPR and E-Privacy will be the beginning of an era when organizations are forced to think about protecting user information.
Post reply on HN