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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

#81

Post by ceejayoz »

oh_sigh wrote: post #68
ceejayoz wrote: post #53

Earlier 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

Probably.

Capital One has a tool called "Paribus" that, if you connect your email, will monitor and get refunds if prices drop or the item doesn't arrive on time. They used to do it with Amazon; they'd tell you something didn't come in the Prime two day shipping window and give you a pre-prepared complaint to get a free month of Prime as compensation.

I can't imagine Amazon liked it much.

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

#82

Post by enos_feedler »

network2592 wrote: post #52
e4e78a06 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you operate in a commodity business you want to impede the market's price discovery mechanism (in this case by making it harder for prices to be aggregated). The same issue and battle is playing out for US healthcare as well due to the recent rule forcing hospitals to make prices public.

Opacity in price discovery as an objective in a commodity business is definitely an insightful framing of the issue. Although the airline industry can be considered a commodity industry, the airline rewards miles industry is less so. What those miles can get you, can essentially change at any time if the airline says so.

This is true. Though one thing I've considered is that the front-end clients to the miles themselves have a balance of usability and inefficiency. They don't want everyone getting maximum dollar for their points. I would maybe so that giving data API access to the points tilts the $USD market price of what a point is worth in the favor of the consumer.

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

#83

Post by smsm42 »

e4e78a06 wrote: post #27
throwaway_b04f wrote: post #18

Years ago I (and a handful of other folks) had a meeting with some people from American who were thinking about opening up their data via an API. One of the other attendees said something to the effect of, "software developers are very, very good at removing inefficiencies when given data like this." It was delicately phrased but the subtext was clearly a warning: if your business depends on asymmetry, an API can sin…

When you operate in a commodity business you want to impede the market's price discovery mechanism (in this case by making it harder for prices to be aggregated). The same issue and battle is playing out for US healthcare as well due to the recent rule forcing hospitals to make prices public.

While some parts of healthcare - like drugs - can be seen as commodity, a lot of it is not. Service differs significantly from doctor to doctor. Not disclosing the prices makes it easier for the providers to have higher prices but it doesn't make the service in question a commodity.

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

#84

Post by floatingatoll »

See also yesterday's FP, about a court's ruling on HTML post-processing once it reaches the user:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29989927

Plaid could file a friend-of-the-court brief here, since they have (presumably!) strong legal grounds to assert that they are legally within their rights to scrape bank websites, as they're doing so as an authorized user-agent, and since browsers are just user-agents, etc.

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

#85

Post by celestialcheese »

A bit of an aside - but does anyone here have experience with insurance policies that would actually cover legal defense in a case like this?

Would Tech E&O cover something like this, or are there riders that would need to be added?

It seems like something that could be strongly defended, and Red Ventures (TPG owner) is a large conglomerate so I doubt legal funds is an issue.

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

#86

Post by paxys »

nwiswell wrote: post #74
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…

> What is their case then exactly? That they're stealing AA's opportunity for, ahem, "customer engagement". They may have a case for tortious interference, I think? It does seem like an uphill climb. The strategy might just be to punish TPG with attorneys' fees and discourage this practice in the future.

Every similar case that has been litigated has been about wholesale copying of a large amount of content (e.g. millions of LinkedIn profiles, Craigslist listings, flight prices).

In this case an individual customer authorized the access and only their data was affected. This is a pretty common use case for a large category of apps – think Mint, Plaid, all wallet apps which organize and track different accounts.

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

#87

Post by mattm »

cbtacy wrote: post #6

https://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…

So my data like my name, address and birthday are exclusive property of American Airlines?

I view them as more of a steward of my data. They have permission from me to use it but the ownership should lie with the individual.

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

#89

Post by ceejayoz »

pmastela wrote: post #57

Gotta love Streisand Effect. I did not know TPG had an app, and now it’s on my Home Screen. Thanks, AA!

Just be aware that TPG is often harmful to consumers; they often tout credit card deals for cards with better sign-on bonuses if you go directly to the issuer; they were touting a 60k Amex Gold bonus when you could just go to Amex directly for 75k. They exist to drive CC referral revenue; if they can't get referral revenue for a card, they won't promote it.

I'm a much bigger fan of https://www.doctorofcredit.com/ for this reason.

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

#90

Post by paxys »

sithadmin wrote: post #78
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…

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?
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