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American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

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Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#91

Post by thayne »

gpvos wrote: post #70
pjc50 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The critical bit is probably the "legality checker". Absolutely no way an employer would offer one of those. Reading between the lines, flight attendant scheduling is probably quite .. adversarial, as shift scheduling at restaurants can be. The employer would like employees to have the minimum information so they meekly accept the shifts they're given.

Reading the descriptions under the sibling comment, it seems to be something that every airline absolutely should offer their employees. You don't want them to work illegally as that could mean huge fines for you.

It's quite possible they consider the benefit of overworking their employees to be worth the risk of having to pay those fines.

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#92

Post by srveale »

dar610 wrote: post #68
pjc50 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The critical bit is probably the "legality checker". Absolutely no way an employer would offer one of those. Reading between the lines, flight attendant scheduling is probably quite .. adversarial, as shift scheduling at restaurants can be. The employer would like employees to have the minimum information so they meekly accept the shifts they're given.

I would imagine that pretty much every airline offers some sort of legality checker to their crew members. If an FA worked a trip illegally that would mean heavy fines from the FAA and from whatever union contract they also violated.

How does the FA know to complain without a legality checker? They have to go through the work of parsing the legalese and calculating time zone differences etc. And if they did complain, the airline says "Sorry, here's a freebie for your trouble" (worth 0.01% of the fine)

Compare that to every FA knowing every single time there's a breach, being able to compare notes etc.

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#93

Post by notahacker »

hedora wrote: post #71
onphonenow wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it’s your employers you do If it’s an app on apples App Store you do

Source? The courts have consistently ruled the other way on the question of scraping. If you then share confidential information with third parties your employer may (or may not) have a case.

App screenshot on the appstore shows a list of names associated with a rota, presumably crew member names scraped from the airlines' password-protected crew portal.

It's not especially surprising airlines don't want unauthorised third party apps accessing and storing personal data from their intranets, even if the third party developer is very ethical about not leaking it to people without passwords and makes beautiful UX

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#94

Post by OJFord »

arciini wrote: post #21

I'm sad that this is happening to an app that's useful to its users, but the reality is that scraping is legal, always possible, but difficult. This particular case is a bit harder since it's not purely using public data, but may still qualify since it's likely scraping with legally-obtained credentials. I know of businesses (scraping for ride-sharing, scraping for business intelligence for retailers, scraping from L…

> the reality is that scraping is legal, always possible, but difficult.

> This particular case is a bit harder since it's not purely using public data, but may still qualify since it's likely scraping with legally-obtained credentials.

No, it's easy: they're employees, they can be told they're not allowed to do that. Doesn't matter if the app's legally allowed to exist or not.

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#95

Post by mrweasel »

pjc50 wrote: post #38
ketzo wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two thoughts: 1. Wow, that looks like an extremely useful app if you're a flight attendant! 2. How is their employer not providing this functionality? I guess maybe they are, but only parts, or it's a shittier version. But still.

The critical bit is probably the "legality checker". Absolutely no way an employer would offer one of those. Reading between the lines, flight attendant scheduling is probably quite .. adversarial, as shift scheduling at restaurants can be. The employer would like employees to have the minimum information so they meekly accept the shifts they're given.

It should be the job of the employer to ensure scheduling is in compliance with safety regulation and agreements negotiated with the unions. The app should be necessary, but given that it is, that can easily be viewed as American Airlines knowingly breaks rules. That seems legally questionable.

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#96

Post by vkou »

scarface74 wrote: post #73
acedTrex wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are, it's just spread across multiple websites and datasources as is typical in large corporations. This app scrapes all the sites with the FAs AA credentials and aggregates the data.

My wife and I are going to be doing the whole digital nomad thing across the US, Canada and Mexico starting in less than 2 weeks, getting one way flights and staying in hotels. Currently, we have been flying out of a major Delta hub and we took for granted what an airline app should be. Now as we are planning flights between Delta, American and United, I can confidently say that American has by far the worse consumer…

Do you have work visas for all three countries, or will you lie about your reasons for travel when asked?

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#97

Post by kyle-rb »

entropyie wrote: post #81

Yet another reason to build a website instead of an "App". It seems to me that all this could be delivered via website or PWA... Then no one could block it. Careful client side caching would help for times of no connectivity.

I'm a big advocate for PWAs, but this is a backend data issue. American Airlines isn't forcing app stores to take down the app, they're adding anti-scraping measures to prevent the app's backend from being able to request data for flights, shifts, etc.

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#98

Post by karlkatzke »

dar610 wrote: post #68
pjc50 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The critical bit is probably the "legality checker". Absolutely no way an employer would offer one of those. Reading between the lines, flight attendant scheduling is probably quite .. adversarial, as shift scheduling at restaurants can be. The employer would like employees to have the minimum information so they meekly accept the shifts they're given.

I would imagine that pretty much every airline offers some sort of legality checker to their crew members. If an FA worked a trip illegally that would mean heavy fines from the FAA and from whatever union contract they also violated.

They don’t. Employees are responsible for checking the math of the scheduler. in the case of pilots, the employee has liability in this situation as well as the airline. Especially in situations where there is bad weather nationwide, employees can be and absolutely are scheduled incorrectly by schedulers and employees have to maintain several sets of numbers (rest time, etc) besides the flying hours that are logged in the airline’s app.

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#99

Post by bornfreddy »

gtirloni wrote: post #88
ryandrake wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems pretty clear that they want to block it because they want to control how the productivity information is accessed, and that control is more important to them than their employees being satisfied and productive. The article mentioned that the author of the app even previously reached out to partner with them (maybe asked for an API so he didn't have to scrape?) and they were still uninterested. Imagine your c…

At a previous job at a certain 3 letter company, we once developed a simple web app so users could do the unimaginable: change their own passwords for an internal billing system. Management congratulated us on the initiative and asked to shut it down immediately. The reason: the users had to previously open a ticket to get their password changed (very secure, right?) and, with this app, the customer would see a 30% r…

Sure sounds like... HAL.

Re: American Airlines is trying to stop a popular app used by flight attendants

#100

Post by nofinator »

arciini wrote: post #21

I'm sad that this is happening to an app that's useful to its users, but the reality is that scraping is legal, always possible, but difficult. This particular case is a bit harder since it's not purely using public data, but may still qualify since it's likely scraping with legally-obtained credentials. I know of businesses (scraping for ride-sharing, scraping for business intelligence for retailers, scraping from L…

It's noteworthy that American Airlines has taken the hardest line against blocking AwardWallet, too [1].

https://yourmileagemayvary.net/2021/12/21/is-this-the-reason...

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