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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

#171

Post by matheusmoreira »

zo1 wrote: post #159
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…

Advertising is to your eyeballs like spam is to your inbox.

Exactly! We ban spam, why can't we ban these advertisers? Make no sense to me.

Advertising is mind hacking. Mind malware. It's about infecting people's minds with ideas nobody asked for. Why is it bad when some spammer does it but fine when advertisers turn our societies into a literal cyberpunk hell? Why does their "commercial interests" somehow legitimitize their industry? Nobody consented to it. Why do they think they can violate our minds without our consent?

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

#172

Post by irrational »

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…

But what happens when nobody sees the ads anymore? I run enough ad blockers that I never see ads on the Internet. I don’t watch broadcast/commercial TV. I don’t listen to broadcast radio. In my area, public advertising like billboards are very rare. It really isn’t difficult to live a life with very little ads.

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

#173

Post by alexpotato »

backtoyoujim wrote: post #110
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.

How does that logic apply to people that sublet rental spaces ?

Some leases specify that sub letting is not allowed and doing some would put the original tenant in breach of the lease agreement.

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

#174

Post by seanp2k2 »

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…

Ooh lord, this reminds me of Mint and their useless email alerts. Every alert is along the lines of “You’ve been charged a foreign transaction fee! Log in to see what / who / when / how much!”. This is obviously to drive engagement at the expense of UX and, you know, actually making a useful service. I absolutely abhor this practice and I’ve written a few feedback emails to explain as much. As if mining all my transaction data wasn’t payment enough, I must also endure irrelevant marketing for yet another credit card or home loan I don’t need. It’s further annoying that despite having a complete view of my finances, they can still fail so stupendously at showing me any ad with even the slightest relevance. I personally feel that although we live in this age of unprecedented consumer data, the actual useful insights leveraged by companies to sell things are still in their infancy. I basically see all consumer data collection companies as ripping off a few parties: advertisers they’re selling the data to, and in turn, companies paying to run “targeted” ads, and of course, consumers. There is a huge consumer appetite for RELEVANT products that could make their lives better or solve even the smallest inconvenience, and yet that appetite is met instead with a deluge of poorly-designed, ill-conceived, ready-for-the-dumpster products. Some people are starting to push back, but it’s a massive problem with no easy solution. Related: https://www.pinkbike.com/news/mechanics-petition-for-repaira...

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

#175

Post by ethbr0 »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #117
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…

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…

And unreasonable bot load is a legitimate concern.

What's illegitimate is that "attempting to ban programmatic access" is on the table as a legal redress.

The only way, from a technical moral standpoint, I could see that being remotely reasonable is if there was 1:1 feature and access parity with an API, then being able to legally force agents to use the API.

But critically that's 1:1 feature - if a user can do it, the API offers a method to do it.

And 1:1 access - if an unauthenticated user can do it, then no mandating an account is required for API use. And if any user can do it, then any user will be approved for an API key.

Otherwise, it's just ceding more power to companies.

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

#176

Post by ryandrake »

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…

Many moons ago I wrote and published a little app that allowed users of a popular VOIP provider to listen to their voicemail. Previously, voicemail functionality was limited to their awful web-only interface, but the audio files could be easily scraped once the user provided their credentials.

My biggest fear/risk was getting noticed and sued by the company, merely for letting users request HTML and display it differently than the company wished. The app is no longer available, so I guess I survived but the idea of $BIGCO crushing me with lawyers was chilling.

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

#177

Post by endofreach »

paxys wrote: post #62

Interesting that AA frames it as TPG's app stealing confidential customer data, while it is the customer who set up the app and willingly provided their credentials in the first place. Will AA be able to find a single customer who has a problem with what TPG does? What is their case then exactly? Would they similarly sue the app if customers were copy pasting data into it, rather than accessing it programmatically? F…

So basically corporations don‘t even pretend like they grasp the idea, that you pwn your data. It is theirs. You can use it, give it to companies, to the government, but you are not allowed to destroy it (just like currencies in many countries). LOL.

Edit: typo. I wrote „pwn“ instead of „own“. But then I thought about it and somehow it feels appropriate.

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

#178

Post by seanp2k2 »

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…

Don’t forget fake news and talk show hosts willing to say anything that gets people talking all for the purpose of selling crap products at exorbitant markups.

Democracy be damned, there’s money to be made on dietary supplements!

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

#179

Post by dragonwriter »

staticassertion wrote: post #169
nybble41 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is their case then exactly? Speculating, but TOS generally say that you're not allowed to share your password with anyone. Assuming that's true for the AA site, AA might argue that TPG is encouraging users to break their TOS ("tortious interference"). Though if app doesn't actually share the password with TPG and just uses it locally there may well be a question of whether entering your password into a third-p…

I doubt that part of a TOS is enforceable as it restricts speech. edit: No it doesn't, brain fart.

> I doubt that part of a TOS is enforceable as it restricts speech.

Contractual restrictions on speech are enforceable.

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

#180

Post by xbar »

paxys wrote: post #108
nybble41 wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is their case then exactly? Speculating, but TOS generally say that you're not allowed to share your password with anyone. Assuming that's true for the AA site, AA might argue that TPG is encouraging users to break their TOS ("tortious interference"). Though if app doesn't actually share the password with TPG and just uses it locally there may well be a question of whether entering your password into a third-p…

RIP password managers then, I guess

Yes. And iCloud-based Safari-storage of passwords for all iPhone users.
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