American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other
141–150 of 332 posts
Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other
#142The web is broken. The original promise of client/server services was that the server would provide data on a universal open data format, and the USER AGENT (initially a web browser, but other kinds were expected) would process it in a format to the liking of the user, and satisfying their needs . Compare this to the current situation where the industry standard is that the servers do indeed provide data through some…
The customer is an advertizer. The humans browsing the web are the product being sold.
Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other
#143Earlier 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
Shopify offers to track packages if you link your email, so i assume it could be related.
Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other
#144> 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…
> Imagine how more efficient things could be if this cancer was eradicated once and for all.
Do you mean we should build a starship, Ark B, put all marketers into it, and send them all to a very distant planet?
Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other
#145I 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…
I’ve been on the other side of this, defending against bots. 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…
Makes sense. Thanks for this context.
Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other
#146https://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.
> Seems like any web browser by a for-profit company would immediately be in breach
A web browser cannot be in breach, because a web browser is not a legal entity capable of being a party to an agreement. The entity in breach would be the person using the browser, if they were using it in a way that was against the TOS.
BTW, that TOS is ambiguous. I see two ways it can be parsed. First,
> 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))
I.e., "otherwise use the content of the Site for public or commercial purposes" is one item in the list of prohibited things. Second,
> 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)
I.e., "otherwise use the Site" is one of the list items, and "for public or commercial purposes" modifies the whole list?
If it is the latter it is saying you can do what you want if it is not for public or commercial purposes.
If it is the former, it is saying you may not do any of the explicitly listed things, and you can't do anything not listed if you are doing that thing for public or commercial purposes. You can only do things that are not explicitly listed and then only if they are private and non-commercial.
I'd guess they meant the latter, because under the former it is hard to see any way to use the site at all without violating the TOS. If that is the case, they should have written it as "You may not for public or commercial purposes ".
On the other hand, it would't actually be all that surprising for a big company to write a TOS that technically prohibits their users from actually using the site, so who knows?
Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other
#147Earlier 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…
> Well first you're going to have to convince people to pay for the things they use
> People would rather trade their attention for free stuff than their money for priced goods and services.
No, I don’t think this is true. I think this is something people in adtech tell themselves to sleep better at night. There’s lots of money in ads and free stuff, but there are many companies doing quite well by having customers pay for stuff.
Netflix is worth $200B plus, more than the ad tv networks. Those networks said for years that customers won’t pay and need ads. They were wrong. And I’d also add that they wanted more. They charged for cable channels and still sold ads.
People want choices and don’t mind paying for value.
Ads are bad for people.
Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> People would rather trade their attention for free stuff than their money for priced goods and services. How would you explain the fact that people paid for cable and premium cable channels (e.g. HBO) in the past when free network TV has always been an option?
Exclusive content. That's why I pay for HBO anyways.
Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other
#149Earlier 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.
Any car that has a screen could have a built-in diagnostic tool displaying all the trouble codes, live data from sensors, etc. The computer behind the screen already has access to said data as it's connected to the various data buses.
But yet even in 2022 the best we can do is "service engine soon" and getting more information than that requires an expensive visit to the dealership.
Re: American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Nah, the video game industry has micro-transactions down to a science.
I guess it depends on your definition of micro, I meant sub-$1.