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Specifically the airline industry, all industrial complexes, or adapting/adjusting copyright and intellectual property laws? Edit to add: Do you really have to downvote, don't you have something better to do with your click?
i assume they mean advertising.
> The interest was monetization of customer eyeballs, an American Airlines source shared that they wanted customers checking accounts at AA.com where they could be marketed to. It seems like so many problems, annoyances and inconvenience in modern society are artificially created/maintained just to enable this disgusting industry. Imagine how more efficient things could be if this cancer was eradicated once and for a…
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Favoritism should have aboslutely nothing to do with this. Public stuff on the internet should be exactly that, public. You have no expectation of privacy and it's up to you as an owner/operator to maintain the security of your site, make sure you aren't being dos'd, screen scraped (use strong captchas, validated accounts), etc.
Yeah but this is about PRIVATE data like your miles and points after logging in to AA. So not even sure your comment applies here.
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I don’t this matters, from a legal standpoint. The issue isn’t whether or not it’s what the customers wanted. The issue is that TPG wasn’t the party that entered into the agreement with AA when creating the account. I’m not suggesting it’s right or wrong, but that’s the issue.
If I authorize an agent to act on my behalf in a particular way wouldn't they be considered and authorized as me? If I make a contract with Bob to mow my lawn, it's not like Bob's workers or employees have to sign the contract too. TPG shouldn't need to be party to the contract to be an agent of one of the contracted parties.
If screen scraping is illegal just know that pretty much every budget and banking app is also illegal because they all use screen scraping.
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Opacity in price discovery as an objective in a commodity business is definitely an insightful framing of the issue. Although the airline industry can be considered a commodity industry, the airline rewards miles industry is less so. What those miles can get you, can essentially change at any time if the airline says so.
This is true. Though one thing I've considered is that the front-end clients to the miles themselves have a balance of usability and inefficiency. They don't want everyone getting maximum dollar for their points. I would maybe so that giving data API access to the points tilts the $USD market price of what a point is worth in the favor of the consumer.
TPG just highlights the shenanigans which puts pressure on airlines to change the value even more frequently. This in turn makes the shenanigans more apparent which might call for regulation.
This lawsuit is attempting to nip this process in the bud before stumbling on regulation. But, fundamentally, the relationship is asymmetric regardless of any data api access.
I wrote a scraper for Air Canada's aeroplan program a few years ago. I wanted to track my points in my own custom native app. I probably had $10,000 worth of points in my account. One day I logged in to find out my account had been deactivated on suspicions of fraud. After several lengthy phone calls with their team (including sending them the node.js script I was using), I was able to get my account restored. For th…
Basically: Well-behaved and well-intentioned scraping bots are rare. You’d get a lot of users setting update rates to 60 seconds that did a new login every time and creating as much traffic as 1000 users. Then they’d release the script for integration with something people and suddenly you have 1000 people each creating 1000 times as many login requests as a single user.
Another common problem was forgetting to implement reasonable back off for failures. A lot of newbies write scripts that immediately retry on a tight infinite loop whenever something goes wrong, sending a huge stream of requests to your server if the API changes or when it goes down. Again, multiply this by many users sharing a script and it becomes a problem.
Then of course there are people trying to make a business out of extracting your company’s data, such as putting it in some other website where they can serve ads over your content or whatever (think of all of those StackOverflow scraping websites in Google)
Basically, you can’t investigate the motivations of each individual user. You just block them all.
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Unfortunately, like the real cancer, it has too many forms and too many causes to have a simple way of eradicating it. And unlike the real cancer, nobody is seriously investing into fixing it. Maybe some kind of paradigm shift is required to make the approach of "we hold data about you that you need hostage so we could sell you stuff and control your behavior" no longer acceptable. After all, you wouldn't accept if t…
>car dealer would be the only one who had access to your car mileage or maintenance records So yea, I have the next billion dollar idea. The gas gauge app. $3.99 a month to know how much farther you can travel. Also, we remove the gauge from inside the car.
> The interest was monetization of customer eyeballs, an American Airlines source shared that they wanted customers checking accounts at AA.com where they could be marketed to. It seems like so many problems, annoyances and inconvenience in modern society are artificially created/maintained just to enable this disgusting industry. Imagine how more efficient things could be if this cancer was eradicated once and for a…
"Industry could not benefit from its increased productivity without a substantial increase in consumer spending. This contributed to the development of mass marketing designed to influence the population's economic behavior on a larger scale.[24] "