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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

#191

Post by [deleted] »

OJFord wrote: post #94
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.

[deleted]

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

#192

Post by dpifke »

dkonofalski wrote: post #183
dpifke wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It might be possible to build this app in a way that none of the information ever leaves the device. I would be very surprised if that was the case here. Most large IT departments have a list of approved browsers and browser extensions. The scenario you described would fall under the same policy. If Chrome uploaded the content of intranet web pages to Google, I expect it would be banned as well.

>It might be possible to build this app Not only is it possible to build it this way but I think it's far more likely that it already is built this way. Since the app is pulling up schedules for individual users, there's no benefit to scraping the info on a server or caching any of it as it would be unique for each user. There's no reason for that info to leave the device. The content is pulled, formatted, and then d…

Looking at the privacy policy[0], the app does send some information to backend servers, specifically "flight related information." If the employees' "flight related information" is not publicly available, I can see AA having a legitimate issue with it.

But the scraping does appear to happen on-device, and it claims the password is not transmitted, so that's better than I initially thought.

[0] https://www.iubenda.com/privacy-policy/40331177

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

#193

Post by a4isms »

krferriter wrote: post #134
a4isms wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not entirely sure that is a nonsensical argument. I am permitted to use any client I like to perform SQL queries of our customer data, but if the client were to happen to route the data through a third party, I would be in employment-jeopardy breach of our security policies. Similar rules goes for hardware: I can bring my own device for reading and locally storing our email and chats, but customer data is not to…

But in this case, isn't the "third party" just a piece of client-side software that performs a bunch of http requests to systems the client user is allowed to access, on a device the user is allowed to use, in order to aggregate the results and show them all in one spot? It's not being sent to third party systems off the user's phone. Banning it would be like restricting certain sql clients, like allowing the CLI cli…

I agree with you!

I also don’t really agree with the ban, and seriously doubt that they have any reason other than, “We dunno what this is, and are too lazy^H^H^H^H busy to think it through, give a decision, and deal this the precedent of allowing screen scraping and/or third-party clients.”

All I was trying to say is that while I may disagree with their call, I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s “nonsense.” Just wrong :-)

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

#194

Post by Retric »

notahacker wrote: post #171
hedora wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really matter if the airlines want them to scrape or not; it is their right to scrape.

They don't have a right to scrape password protected personal data off an intranet, and AA also have the right to attempt to block an app or its scrapers regardless of whether the scraping is legal or not.

In this context blocking scrappers is probably legal for AA. However it might be illegal in other contexts, such as if there are any concerns around disability.

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

#195

Post by glonq »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #103

"One flight attendant said of the current situation affecting Sequence Decoder that they had “never seen a company go out of their way to make life harder for their workers.”" Every large company I've worked for had an IT department (or similar) that intentionally made developers'/sysadmins' lives harder. They don't care. So the good people leave, morale drops, productivity drops, management starts implementing crap…

I wish more people realized that HR, IT, and accounting are secondary services within a corporation. They aren't the core of the company. The people inventing, building, and selling widgets are the core. Everybody else is just a necessary evil that exists to help facilitate and streamline the stuff that matters.

Employees should not be bending over backwards to suit HR and IT workflows and policies. Policymakers should be bending over backwards to invent lean, effective processes.

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

#196

Post by gpvos »

not2b wrote: post #180
gpvos wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can always still publish when they don't react within a reasonable time, and add a comment to that effect, as you can often see in newspaper articles.

From the article: "American Airlines has been contacted for comment." Evidently they did not respond.

Ah, I overlooked that. But I would have searched for it before posting a comment like nnm's above.

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

#197

Post by Brian_K_White »

OJFord wrote: post #184
Brian_K_White wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, employees are not actually property, and there are actually limits on what an employer can tell an employee. Everything an employer might possibly try to say about using any other software or tools to collect, handle, and redisplay "their" data, applies exactly the same to a blind employees screen reader. Hell it applies to glasses . Thank deity for blind people and other disabilities making it actually ill…

I'm not sure why it reads as 'defending [the employer]'s position', but that's not my position, I don't care at all. (I'm not American, I may very well never have anything to do with the airline even as a customer.) If you are its employee, jolly good luck to you with your 'well if I were blind what I've been provided with while not blind would not be adequate and I might need to use a different tool to this which wo…

"I'm not sure why it reads as 'defending [the employer]'s position'"

Saying that the employer has the right to dictate those terms is literally and explicitly doing nothing else but defending their position that they have the right to dictate those terms.

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

#198

Post by smcl »

Firmwarrior wrote: post #178
smcl wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What else could it be? Swimming trunks/swimsuit. Clean indoor trainers for basketball/volleyball/circuit training/etc, or scruffy outdoor ones for cross-country running, orienteering or anything muddy outside. In winter they may need to take something warmer if there's outdoor activities planned, some locations in the north or near mountains may even do skiing or cross-country skiing. In our school in winter time w…

> (casually implies kids have multiple workout outfits/shoes and regularly engage in expensive outdoor activities) Man, sometimes I'll run into a reminder that I grew up poor as dirt, haha

Ah come on "multiple workout outfits" is a little bit of a stretch of what I said. Everything I described except for the skiing stuff is normal in anything but the very poorest countries - in addition to what you listed, you didn't have a jumper for when it's cold or some old trainers for when it's muddy? I just wore my normal shorts for football whenever we went swimming (fyi my school didn't have a pool, but some do) but obviously that's not practical for girls so swimsuit was worth mentioning.

I never got to go skiing as a kid, but in Central Europe (Czechia for sure, but probably Austria, Switzerland and Slovakia) and the Nordics (importantly where that story took place) it isn't just a fancy pursuit for rich people. I know people earning like 20000 CZK/month ($10k/yr) here who go skiing.

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

#199

Post by a1369209993 »

jay-anderson wrote: post #108

We have bots scraping some of our pages at work. We've attempted to reach out but haven't received a response. We don't mind the bots so much themselves, but we want them to be well behaved. Currently they are making calls over and over again that return a 4xx response and are a significant portion of our traffic. We want to request that they stop making bad requests and slow down (we do have throttling in place, but…

> but this just gave them more errors to ignore and retry.

So null-route the offending IPs on a [0]24-hour timeout? The problem you're describing isn't "scraping", it's "low-grade denial-of-service attack (that you suspect might be a result of attempted scraping)", and should be addressed accordingly. (The parenthesised part doesn't really matter.)

0: exponentially increasing up to -, for automated versions, but you're presumably already familiar with the current batch of offending source addresses.

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

#200

Post by dkonofalski »

dpifke wrote: post #192
dkonofalski wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It might be possible to build this app Not only is it possible to build it this way but I think it's far more likely that it already is built this way. Since the app is pulling up schedules for individual users, there's no benefit to scraping the info on a server or caching any of it as it would be unique for each user. There's no reason for that info to leave the device. The content is pulled, formatted, and then d…

Looking at the privacy policy[0], the app does send some information to backend servers, specifically "flight related information." If the employees' "flight related information" is not publicly available, I can see AA having a legitimate issue with it. But the scraping does appear to happen on-device, and it claims the password is not transmitted, so that's better than I initially thought. [0] https://www.iubenda.co…

That would make sense for that context, though, since they're likely providing additional info regarding flight information and, according to the policy, only for flights that are saved to the user's account. That would imply that things like flight numbers are stored in the user's account which makes complete sense and wouldn't necessarily be anything other than public information.
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