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American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

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Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#121

Post by arcticbull »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #109
Nextgrid wrote: post #35

> 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…

Yeah. Advertising ruins everything. Everything. They are directly and indirectly responsible for the poor state of consumer technology today. Privacy violations? Advertising. Borderline unusable websites? Advertising. Deliberately addictive social media? Advertising. Almost everything that's wrong with computing today is fueled by this industry's entitlement to our attention. > Imagine how more efficient things could…

Well first you're going to have to convince people to pay for the things they use. History has shown us they have practically zero interest in doing so. People would rather trade their attention for free stuff than their money for priced goods and services.

The industry has grown out of this human behavior, not vv.

[edit] Humans have a limited capacity for making purchasing decisions. This is why in 20+ years nobody has made a successful micropayments based product or platform. Further, simply paywalling software or services means 99% of people will not use it. People also are uncomfortable with a system that just withdraws money from their account to pay people - and a universal subscription model isn't particularly tenable due to the competing interests of market participants.

If you can solve this problem with something other than ads, I will be your first investor because you're going to be the richest human on earth.

It's easy to say "ads bad" - ok, but the real question is what are we going to replace them with?

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#122

Post by Beached »

enos_feedler wrote: post #59

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…

at a previous employer we had a similar issue as you. from the employer side, we had a managed api platform that normalized all our messy data stores into a single api front end. our websites basically all called this api to populate the data in the page requests.

except we didn't write this platform, we paid for it. and it is licensed per 100 queries.

so when. a single account starts doing 30k queries every hour, 24/7. the pocketbook was directly hit. and yes, web scraping was in the tos that every account agreed to but never read

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#123

Post by joe_the_user »

ativzzz wrote: post #107
Nextgrid wrote: post #35

> 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…

Is a website considered a private space (maybe not, but you agree to a TOS when you fly AA)? If so, you should have the right to say how your space is used by others, regardless of if we believe marketing is ethical or not. If AA doesn't want their data being used anywhere else, sounds like they should have the right to do that, just like we have the right to remove people from our private spaces if they do things ag…

It's pretty outrageous that to fly with a given airlines you give up X many rights of online use.

This seems to fit the definition of an unconscionable contract pretty well.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscionability

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#124

Post by bsenftner »

pixl97 wrote: post #98
smsm42 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Shhhh... seriously; GM and others from the car industry might get the idea and actually implement such a travesty.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#125

Post by vineyardmike »

Nextgrid wrote: post #44
cbtacy wrote: post #6

https://www.aa.com/i18n/customer-service/support/legal-infor... "Unless otherwise noted, all information, AAdvantage® account information, articles, data, images, passwords, Personal Identification Numbers ("PINs"), screens, text, user names, Web pages, or other materials (collectively "Content") appearing on the Site are the exclusive property of American Airlines Group, Inc., or American Airlines, Inc., or their su…

> You may not copy , display , distribute, download , license, modify, publish, re-post, reproduce , reuse, sell, transmit , use to create a derivative work, or otherwise use the content of the Site for public or commercial purposes . [emphasis mine] Seems like any web browser by a for-profit company would immediately be in breach.

Especially if you accessed that site over a VPN.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#126

Post by matheusmoreira »

ativzzz wrote: post #107
Nextgrid wrote: post #35

> 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…

Is a website considered a private space (maybe not, but you agree to a TOS when you fly AA)? If so, you should have the right to say how your space is used by others, regardless of if we believe marketing is ethical or not. If AA doesn't want their data being used anywhere else, sounds like they should have the right to do that, just like we have the right to remove people from our private spaces if they do things ag…

Their servers are their own private spaces. That's the line. I will not do anything that subverts their control of their own computers. I will not make their servers execute my code. Their website, however, is just data they sent to my computer.

They have exactly zero right to dictate what I do on my computer. Their HTML is being rendered on my computer and I absolutely reserve the right to delete or modify elements in any way and for any reason. Their javascript is executing on my computer and I absolutely reserve the right to delete and modify functions if I deem necessary.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#127

Post by fault1 »

oh_sigh wrote: post #68
ceejayoz wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do it enough and they'll stop. All of my Amazon order emails now only tell me the order number and the total cost, with zero information on what products are included.

I wonder if Amazon was worried about companies like Google mining sales data from emails? Or something along those lines

I think this was precisely the issue.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#128

Post by Glyptodon »

gowld wrote: post #114
Glyptodon wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What happens if you hire someone to be your agent at your job?

They should arbitrage the difference between our pay to replace me and get me fired.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#129

Post by matt_heimer »

cbtacy wrote: post #6

https://www.aa.com/i18n/customer-service/support/legal-infor... "Unless otherwise noted, all information, AAdvantage® account information, articles, data, images, passwords, Personal Identification Numbers ("PINs"), screens, text, user names, Web pages, or other materials (collectively "Content") appearing on the Site are the exclusive property of American Airlines Group, Inc., or American Airlines, Inc., or their su…

The more relevant sections are a little further down:

Your account information is owned by and proprietary to American Airlines. While you may access your account information through the Site, you may not give access to your account to any person or entity other than a member of your household or a person that you directly supervise as part of your career or employment. You may not give access to your account to any third party on-line service, including, but not limited to any mileage management service, mileage tracking service, or mileage aggregation service.

You must access your account information directly through the Site and not through a third party Website, including but not limited to any mileage management service, mileage tracking service, or mileage aggregation service. You also violate this Agreement if you enable an AAdvantage member to access account information without visiting the Site.

Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

#130

Post by bobthepanda »

arcticbull wrote: post #121
matheusmoreira wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Advertising ruins everything. Everything. They are directly and indirectly responsible for the poor state of consumer technology today. Privacy violations? Advertising. Borderline unusable websites? Advertising. Deliberately addictive social media? Advertising. Almost everything that's wrong with computing today is fueled by this industry's entitlement to our attention. > Imagine how more efficient things could…

Well first you're going to have to convince people to pay for the things they use. History has shown us they have practically zero interest in doing so. People would rather trade their attention for free stuff than their money for priced goods and services. The industry has grown out of this human behavior, not vv. [edit] Humans have a limited capacity for making purchasing decisions. This is why in 20+ years nobody…

I will say, I find it interesting that newspapers never developed an equivalent to "the daily paper."

Even in the 2000s I remember newspapers not costing more than a dollar or two. I would personally prefer a one-off payment of some small amount to get the website for the day or X amount of articles instead of some god-awful subscription that has to be cancelled via some shitty call center process where they try to stop you twenty times.

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