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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

#131

Post by chx »

jaywalk wrote: post #105
vkou wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Working remotely for your employer (as in, you're not traveling for work, but working while traveling) is not in breach of any tourist visa restrictions.

THIS IS NOT TRUE! BEWARE OF THIS!

In reality, you are basically relying on the fact that no one can tell when you open your laptop whether you check personal email or work email etc. But legislation wise you very well might be in breach of visitor conditions. And if you stay long enough, taxes might kick in.

Canada is a notable exemption because IRCC issued a note on What kind of activities are not considered to be “work”?:

> long distance (by telephone or internet) work done by a temporary resident whose employer is outside Canada and who is remunerated from outside Canada;

However, unless the relevant immigrant authority or legislation did this , the law still applies.

There are now numerous countries which issue special digital nomad visas. See https://travel.stackexchange.com/q/45092/4188 for more.

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

#132

Post by hedora »

notahacker wrote: post #93
hedora wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 beautif…

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

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

#133

Post by pc86 »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #8
ajkjk wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty vague.

Yeah, this was what I was trying to understand. This makes it sound like the app could be a daily listing of flights they need to work. Is that all it is?

There is a top-level comment higher up that lists the individual features. One is notably absent from AA's internal systems: checking that FA schedules are consistent with the regulations governing how much they can work. But the crux of it is that is takes the FA's AA credentials, collects their personal data from disparate internal AA systems, and displays it in a sane way to the FA. And presumably at least a couple of the features (like the legality checker) are sugar on top.

I would not underestimate how terrible internal legacy systems at a company like AA could be. It seems completely reasonable to me that this app could save FAs an hour a day or more. And if they're like pilots (who are typically only paid on time from wheels up to touchdown) that is likely an unpaid hour.

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

#134

Post by krferriter »

a4isms wrote: post #89
TobyTheDog123 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is nonsense. This would be like claiming you have to use a company-sponsored to-do list app, or a company-sponsored git client, or a company-sponsored text editor, or a company-sponsored FTP client. I'd hate to be at any job that enforces any single one of those. There are many arguments against this app, but this is not one of them.

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 clients, but banning pgAdmin or MYSQL Workbench.

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

#135

Post by scarface74 »

pc86 wrote: post #130
jaywalk wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, what you're saying is in reference to traveling for your employer. Being a "digital nomad" is traveling for yourself.

This is notably distinct from visa requirements, but taxes are typically owed in the jurisdiction in which the work takes place, if you are there for a certain period of time or longer. The exact time period varies based on locality (state/county/city in the US). It is complex enough that the only answer that is definitely wrong is "I'm just traveling for me so I can do whatever I want."

If you’re a professional athlete, and I’m almost sure none of us are, you pay taxes for each state where you played a game. I’m not sure how it is apportioned.

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

#136

Post by toss1 »

sammalloy wrote: post #77
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.

> The employer would like employees to have the minimum information This kind of old, hierarchical thinking from the 1950s needs to go away.

>>This kind of old, hierarchical thinking from the 1950s needs to go away.

Yes, it does, but no, it won't.

Just as democracies must always be better armed and prepared than expansionist autocracies, or the autocracies will take over, people need to be better armed and prepared than those who want to exploit them, or they will get exploited.

Unfortunately, the exploiters often arrive better armed and prepared, and it is an uphill battle.

Often, the only winning move is to not play the game.

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

#137

Post by GlenTheMachine »

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…

Our IT security people give every impression that their preferred solution would be to drop all the computers in the river and lock the doors.

I naively went to them once with a suspected security intrusion event; they threatened to have me arrested. I couldn't convince them that I wasn't the one responsible.

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

#138

Post by lotsofpulp »

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…

Your example is a business wanting to make things inefficient for its customers in order to increase the business's profits.

That is different from a business making things inefficient for its own workers, which would reduce a business's profits.

The former might even be expected, but the latter is just bad management.

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

#139

Post by shagie »

pc86 wrote: post #130
jaywalk wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, what you're saying is in reference to traveling for your employer. Being a "digital nomad" is traveling for yourself.

This is notably distinct from visa requirements, but taxes are typically owed in the jurisdiction in which the work takes place, if you are there for a certain period of time or longer. The exact time period varies based on locality (state/county/city in the US). It is complex enough that the only answer that is definitely wrong is "I'm just traveling for me so I can do whatever I want."

As an extreme example of this:

https://kansaspolicy.org/rethinking-taxes-around-remote-work...

> Kansas has policies that could deter remote work and are deterring greater interstate work with our neighbors. Kansas requires employer withholding for people working in the state just for one day, which creates an annoying hurdle for companies trying to operate even in a small capacity in Kansas. In 2020, the Kansas legislature considered a bill that would have extended the withholding requirement period to 30 days, but the proposal died

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

#140

Post by ryandrake »

pif wrote: post #78
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…

I'm not sure if I understand your comment. What do you mean with "productivity information"? And why access should be so important?

The article is annoyingly vague about what information the app actually accesses/provides, so we kind of have to guess and assume it's some kind of information that makes the employees' jobs easier.
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