Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other

viewfromthewing.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

311–320 of 332 posts

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

#311

Post by [deleted] »

paxys wrote: post #230
tiahura wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone else gave a decent answer to your question, but I’m not sure that’s this situation. TPG is scraping AA and then displaying the results in TPG’s app. There’s an http request being sent by a TPG computer and IP address to AA. I think that’s a relevant distinction. I also think that’s relevant to whether TPG is a party to the AA TOS.

I don't think that's an important distinction. TPG could be doing everything locally on the user's device (maybe they are?) and AA's complaint would be no different.

[deleted]

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

#312

Post by KarlKemp »

adventured wrote: post #163
alexpotato wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

> 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? The issue you're failing to separate out is that you're talking about entertainment with television. Websites are largely not comparable in entertainment value, and most are not entertaining at all. People will pay a lot for entertainment. That's why blogs are w…

I don’t necessarily disagree, but substack would seem to be an example of quite a bit of success for writers.

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

#313

Post by matheusmoreira »

asxd wrote: post #165
learc83 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that once you segment your customers into paying and non paying. The non paying customers become much less valuable to advertisers and the paying customers become much more valuable. So the service needs to charge even more, which makes paying customers even more valuable in a feedback loop. The usual result is that eventually the service can’t help themselves and starts showing paying customers “a few…

> The non paying customers become much less valuable to advertisers I can see this being true, but I'm curious why. Is this because the advertisers know the paying customers have the cash to pay for the service?

Advertisers want the attention of people with disposable income. If someone's paying for something as superfluous as a streaming service, then they must have more than enough money to spend on whatever they want to sell.

The more you pay in general, the more they want you to pay them specifically.

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

#314

Post by matheusmoreira »

dkonofalski wrote: post #132
ativzzz wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The issue with this sentiment, in my opinion, is that users have access to this data by logging in and they've provided the app with that access by providing their credentials. Unless a court is going to go down the road of preventing users from sharing their own information, I don't see how AA can do anything about this. If you can view this info in a web browser, you can scrape it.

They'll invent some "acceptable use policy" document that says you can only talk to their servers using their software which of course does what they want, namely monetize your attention by showing you ads. Then they'll trick and coerce people into accepting or signing it.

Complete bullshit but it's totally something these judges would understand. One would think these people would actually protect consumers from corporation abuse...

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

#315

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

> 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.

They think the data belongs to them. They think they own the consumers and all the data they generate. To them, it's their consumer data, something they abuse to get consumers to log in and look at ads, and they'll be damned if they let some random software have access to it no matter what the user wants.

GDPR makes it clear that personal data belongs to the person, these companies are just middle men who are temporarily processing it. Cases like this perfectly illustrate why such a change in perspective is necessary. Access to this data is a privilege and it can be revoked.

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

#316

Post by moralestapia »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #315
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…

> 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. They think the data belongs to them. They think they own the consumers and all the data they generate. To them, it's their consumer data, something they abuse to get consumers to log in and look at ads, and they'll be damned if they…

>We already make $1,000s per customer on a business model that we have developed and refined for decades.

>Let's create a crappy experience that the user has to put up with, to squeeze a few extra cents per year.

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

#317

Post by matheusmoreira »

moralestapia wrote: post #316
matheusmoreira wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. They think the data belongs to them. They think they own the consumers and all the data they generate. To them, it's their consumer data, something they abuse to get consumers to log in and look at ads, and they'll be damned if they…

>We already make $1,000s per customer on a business model that we have developed and refined for decades. >Let's create a crappy experience that the user has to put up with, to squeeze a few extra cents per year.

Never underestimate the greed of these people. They'd literally put ads under our eyelids if they could. They'd put ads in our dreams. They see our moments of peace as an opportunity to get richer.

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

#318

Post by matheusmoreira »

mitquinn wrote: post #13

The trademark/copyright stuff I get but I don't see how the screen scraping could be illegal.. How is it any different than a person logging in and writing it down manually..

It's not different in any way and definitely not immoral. Essentially it's "illegal" because it hurts corporate interests and they want to make it stop. Corporations have money and will just buy laws with lobbyists if they have to, it makes no sense to take this process seriously.

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

#319

Post by dragonwriter »

FireBeyond wrote: post #291
dragonwriter wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But if TPG is an agent of the customer, then AA should be suing the customer. Respondeat superior lets you sue the principal for torts of an agent committed in the scope of their agency, but it doesn't eliminate the liability of the agent for their own torts. You typically want to sue the principal when the agent is less able to pay, less willing to settle, or one of many easily replaceable agents employed by the p…

And here's me, all idealistic, thinking that decisions on who to sue should be about the merits of the complaint, rather than "who has the potential to give me the most money".

Civil lawsuits are a means of dealing with a problem, mainly by recovering losses (via damages) but also sometimes by imposing other legal compulsion (equitable relief).

“how does filing a lawsuit against this party improve my expected resolution to whatever problem motivated the lawsuit, and is that worth the added cost of pursuing that party” should be part of your calculus. That's not to say the merits of the case don't figure in, but a meritorious case against someone who even the best possible outcome won't do anything to improve your condition is just a way to waste your money and time, and the courts.

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

#320

Post by listenallyall »

enos_feedler wrote: post #294
listenallyall wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it make sense? Bots rarely make HTTP requests for images, css, video clips, large JS files, custom fonts, etc. Real people do. A well-written bot just seeking some specific data can often complete it's task with less than 1% of the resources that would be sent to a "real" user.

I am not sure what "bots" you are talking about here. When I wrote a web scraper to get my Air Canada point values I used a script that fetches the web page and parses it. It was the only way i could get it to work. I had to steel the session token from the browser cookie in order to make it auth

I guarantee that, with some effort, you could write a script to emulate every HTTP call -- logging in, accepting the cookie (just a value in a Set-Cookie header), and requesting the point values, making sure that cookie value is in your Cookie header. Just because you could "only get it to work" one way, does not mean there isn't a far more efficient way.
Post reply on HN