American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

Post by scoot » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 9:00 PM UTC

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…

Post by tiahura » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 9:03 PM UTC

paxys wrote: post #90

sithadmin wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AA and all other US airlines argue that information about your customer account is part of a data set that belongs to them, so they set the terms by which the data may be accessed. It's in their terms of service. This isn't particularly unique to airlines either.

Can a company write "Chrome is not allowed to access this website" in their terms of service and then sue Google when customers still use it?

Post by dheera » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 9:04 PM UTC

jlmorton wrote: post #99

dheera wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. Personally I don't differentiate between carbon-based and silicon-based eyes. They're both eyes. Also, banning silicon-based eyes should be declared a massive, massive ADA violation.

That's a fairly bizarre and Byzantine approach to legalizing screen scraping. If we want to make screen scraping affirmatively legal, we can simply do that. We don't need to anthropomorphize HTML/JSON parsing as equivalent to human vision, and then declare any efforts to restrict that vision to be a violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Lol.

Post by artificial » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 9:05 PM UTC

hlbjhblbljib wrote: post #208

KieranMac wrote: post #188

As an attorney who focuses in this area, I can say that the most interesting question is first where this case will be decided. Texas, and the Northern District of Texas in particular, has historically been the worst jurisdiction in the country for web scrapers to litigate. Southwest has a long history of litigating successfully there, including two cases from just last year. If TPG is going to win, first they'll nee…

I'm surprised more businesses don't ban all of Texas as customers to prevent any litigation happening there.

Post by hunter2_ » Thu, Jan 20, 2022, 9:06 PM UTC

endofreach wrote: post #177

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.