[HN Gopher] American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each...
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American Airlines and The Points Guy are suing each other
Author : vnkatesh
Score : 235 points
Date : 2022-01-20 19:02 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (viewfromthewing.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (viewfromthewing.com)
| mkl95 wrote:
| I used to work at what was basically a microservice shop for
| airlines. The amount of dark shit those apps get away with is
| amazing.
| jmacd wrote:
| How is this any different than Plaid? How has Plaid managed to
| avoid a lawsuit like this?
| gowld wrote:
| "Airline miles" are like cryptocurrency -- a fake currency used
| to run scams. They should be regulated as such.
| clircle wrote:
| Is this different than what Plaid does with bank logins?
| etskinner wrote:
| Some banks are blocking Plaid too
| paxys wrote:
| Or Mint
| mitquinn wrote:
| Concept sounds the same to me
| chrismeller wrote:
| I honestly don't know who to root for here. TPG is one of my
| favorite sites, but American is one of my favorite airlines.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Probably for openness regardless of how many peanuts American
| airlines gives you.
| chrismeller wrote:
| Pfft. They don't offer peanuts anymore, even for Executive
| Platinum.
| easton wrote:
| Pretzels are still pretty good, although they won't give
| them to you on short haul unless you're in first.
| whatshisface wrote:
| If American loses you will get to keep both, so that's what
| you'd root for.
| samschooler wrote:
| TPG 100%. If AA wins this, it means _in general_ it is possible
| to further limit programmatic access to content, you as a user,
| should have access as you see fit.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| You have a favorite Airline? I view them all with contempt
| given their poor business practices. Who's your favorite serial
| killer?
| jrockway wrote:
| I've flown over half a million miles on American. They've
| been pretty nice to me every time. I have nothing to dislike
| about them.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Pretty nice isn't how I would describe great service.
| That's my point, the bar is low when it comes to airlines.
| In your case they should be treating you like a legend.
| jrockway wrote:
| One time I lost my keys and missed my flight, and they
| bumped some paying customer so I could get home sooner.
| Still feel a little bad about that one.
|
| Another time, I was walking out of the Admirals Club at
| DFW to board my flight. One of the agents came running
| out to tell me I was walking in the wrong direction.
|
| But, it's not always great. I had an award ticket in 1st
| class out of LHR, and they didn't clean the plane at all.
| The tray table had sticky soda all over it, and the plane
| was filthy. Miserable flight.
|
| Another time, I had an upgrade to 1st class on a domestic
| flight, but the TSA didn't like my bags and did an
| extensive check (I must have been on some list back then,
| it happened a lot). I arrived way late to the gate, and
| lost my seat. Ended up flying back home in a middle seat
| in the last row. It was miserable.
|
| So, it's a mixed bag, but generally good. It's hard for
| such a large company to offer consistency.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| LOL, that other person was probably me, doh! It's fair,
| air travel comes with a lot of anxiety and heightened
| emotions because most people are going somewhere
| important or just trying to get home.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| I'm skeptical of the new rewards program, but I've only
| ever maintained Gold, so it won't really be hard to switch,
| should I decide to.
|
| I imagine for you it's more or less impossible to start
| over now, so it's pretty lucky that they've been good to
| you so far!
| misiti3780 wrote:
| What is so great of TPG? I have checked it out but I dont
| understand what is so useful about it?
| sabujp wrote:
| Favoritism should have aboslutely nothing to do with this.
| Public stuff on the internet should be exactly that, public.
| You have no expectation of privacy and it's up to you as an
| owner/operator to maintain the security of your site, make sure
| you aren't being dos'd, screen scraped (use strong captchas,
| validated accounts), etc.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| Yeah but this is about PRIVATE data like your miles and
| points after logging in to AA.
|
| So not even sure your comment applies here.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| But it's only accessing _your_ private data with your
| authorization (by providing them your credentials). There
| is no hacking involved and it 's not accessing people's
| information without consent.
| arwineap wrote:
| I agree with your sentiment.
|
| This case is about data behind an auth screen, so it may not
| so easily fall under the definition of public stuff
| [deleted]
| floatingatoll wrote:
| 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.
| celestialcheese wrote:
| 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.
| cbtacy wrote:
| https://www.aa.com/i18n/customer-service/support/legal-infor...
|
| "Unless otherwise noted, all information, AAdvantage(r) 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 subsidiaries and
| affiliates"
|
| "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. Nothing on the Site shall
| be construed to confer any grant or license of any intellectual
| property rights, whether by estoppel, by implication, or
| otherwise."
|
| Seems pretty cut-and-dry to me.
| smsm42 wrote:
| Putting something on the site does not establish a legal right.
| I can make a site saying anybody who looks at it owes me a
| million dollars, that wouldn't mean they actually do. And I'm
| not sure my information stored at AA account is actually an
| exclusive property of AA. At the minimum, it's not cut-and-dry
| at all, and probably depends on current legislation and
| caselaw.
| tantalor wrote:
| > You may not ... use the content of the Site for public or
| commercial purposes
|
| That's not what the app was doing:
|
| > The app ... had been 'screen scraping' accounts for members
|
| So it wasn't "public or commercial", it was for people who had
| accounts to view/manage their account details.
|
| Same as Plaid or Mint for banks, or (more generally) any old
| web browser for literally any website.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| It was _absolutely_ "for commercial purposes" for The Points
| Guy.
| tantalor wrote:
| I would take "for commercial purposes" to mean aggregating
| the data for wholesale, or offering some kind of analytics
| service across users.
|
| Whereas showing ads in the same client where the user is
| also viewing their own data is incidental. The purpose is
| to provide a useful intermediary service, and the ads help
| pay for that service, in much the same way a search engine
| can reproduce data from websites and show ads at the same
| time.
| maxmorlocke wrote:
| And where did TPG enter into a commercial relationship or
| affirmatively agree to these terms?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| When they started shilling AA's cards on their site for
| referrals, I suspect. https://thepointsguy.com/card-
| hub/citi-aadvantage-executive-...
| Hokusai wrote:
| "Whoever reads this message agrees to transfer 10% of their
| wealth to Doctors Without Borders at most 5 laboral days after
| the reading"
|
| It could be nice, but it's unenforceable.
| mattm wrote:
| 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.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > 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.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Especially if you accessed that site over a VPN.
| tzs wrote:
| > 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
| <list of things>".
|
| 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?
| matt_heimer wrote:
| The more relevant sections are a little further down:
|
| Your account information is owned by and proprietary to
| American Airlines. While you may access your account
| information through the Site, you may not give access to your
| account to any person or entity other than a member of your
| household or a person that you directly supervise as part of
| your career or employment. You may not give access to your
| account to any third party on-line service, including, but not
| limited to any mileage management service, mileage tracking
| service, or mileage aggregation service.
|
| You must access your account information directly through the
| Site and not through a third party Website, including but not
| limited to any mileage management service, mileage tracking
| service, or mileage aggregation service. You also violate this
| Agreement if you enable an AAdvantage member to access account
| information without visiting the Site.
| decebalus1 wrote:
| > "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. Nothing on the Site
| shall be construed to confer any grant or license of any
| intellectual property rights, whether by estoppel, by
| implication, or otherwise."
|
| > Seems pretty cut-and-dry to me.
|
| EULA for my hn comments: If you're reading this, you must grant
| me 'Droit du seigneur' and name your firstborn 'decebalus1'
| nacs wrote:
| Just because it's written into an EULA, doesn't make it law.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| The relevant word is "you". In this case, TPG (who provided an
| app) is _not_ "you".
|
| That would instead be the AAdvantage (AA's reward program)
| member, who agreed to the TOS originally, and who provided
| their login information to the TPG app so that it can scrape
| information about rewards etc.
|
| So... the lawsuit from AA's side seems pretty bizarre, if the
| facts as presented in this article are true. If AA wanted to
| stop this, presumably they should sue their own rewards members
| who use the TPG app. But obviously that won't happen.
|
| So fundamentally, this seems a case of whether the toolmaker is
| liable for an individual using their tool in a TOS-violating
| way.
|
| Which seems pretty insane, if AA wins. If I pull open Chrome
| developer tools after logging into a website that requires me
| not to inspect its source, why would Google be liable?
|
| ---
|
| And as a side note, "Because privacy and security" is quickly
| becoming the corporate anti-interoperability equivalent of
| "Think of the children."
|
| The default should be that scraping is allowed.
|
| If companies actually care about privacy and security, then
| they can offer an API and encourage access through it. But
| limiting scraping and _not_ offering API access (or
| intentionally crippling it) is bullshit.
| whatshisface wrote:
| It is cut and dry what they want, but the question is, do the
| terms give them merely the right to terminate your account...
| or to sue you?
| mbesto wrote:
| The question is sue you for what? How do the quantify the
| damages? It would be an interesting law suit because if AA
| wins, then it means they are deliberately admitting that
| customers who regularly track their points causes financial
| harm to AA.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| It obviously causes them harm. The points are often
| redeemed at a discount to their regular tickets... which
| are often loss leaders for their points business.
|
| Most airlines lose money on every ticket, and make it up in
| their rewards programs. Only to lose money again on
| redemption. They really only make money on some of the
| inefficiencies..
|
| Easy to follow source:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggUduBmvQ_4
| mbesto wrote:
| Right, I know this to be true. But it's one thing for
| someone to infer that it causes harm, but it's another
| thing if they _legally_ say this is the case.
| whatshisface wrote:
| It reminds me of card counting - it's just playing the
| game, but in a way that's qualitatively different from
| typical play. Just like card counting, the house doesn't
| like people who win too much.
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| They have the standard boilerplate:
|
| " American Airlines also reserves the right in its sole and
| unfettered discretion to deny you access to the Site at any
| time. "
|
| "You agree that this Agreement is made and entered into in
| Tarrant County, Texas. You agree that Texas law governs this
| Agreement's interpretation and/or any dispute arising from
| your access to, dealings with, or use of the Site, without
| regard to conflicts of law principles. Any lawsuit brought by
| you related to your access to, dealings with, or use of the
| Site must be brought in the state or federal courts of
| Tarrant County, Texas. You agree and understand that you will
| not bring against American Airlines Group, Inc., American
| Airlines, Inc., or any of its affiliated entities, agents,
| directors, employees, and/or officers any class action
| lawsuit related to your access to, dealings with, or use of
| the Site."
| ashtonkem wrote:
| If I understand correctly, the enforceability of these TOS
| just added to the bottom of the page is uncertain. After
| all, I wasn't forced to read and agree to the TOS on AA's
| website like I am for say, Twitter or Facebook.
| [deleted]
| Rd6n6 wrote:
| Those click-through terms being ubiquitous removes 99% of
| peoples rights to the legal system, which seems a bit fishy
| whimsicalism wrote:
| I don't see how that gives AA the right to sue.
| FDSGSG wrote:
| It is actually the right of petition enumerated in the
| first amendment which gives AA the right to sue.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Fair enough. I guess I meant a good case.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| If everything written in a contract is always enforceable, the
| entire field of contract law would not exist.
| pdabbadabba wrote:
| But just because AA says so on their website does not make it
| so. Is there any evidence that they actually agreed to the TOS
| you linked? That they even read or were presented with a copy
| of it? And even if they agreed to the terms, what is the
| appropriate remedy for breaching the agreement?
| Rd6n6 wrote:
| Also, are click through agreements really binding? Imagine if
| the terms said "by visiting, you agree to pay us $100,000 in
| 12 months"
| cjsawyer wrote:
| There are worse things to accidentally agree to :)
|
| https://bit-tech.net/news/gaming/pc/gamestation-we-own-
| your-...
| cracrecry wrote:
| They can say whatever they want. It is a completely different
| thing whenever that is legal or not.
|
| I can say in a written agreement with my workers that they are
| my slaves, or that they can not work anywhere else ever. They
| can even accept those terms, but that does not make it legal.
|
| There are always fair use clauses that copyright law accepts.
| That data about a customer is the exclusive property of a
| company is not really true. In some way it is actually the
| property of the customer.
| Dig1t wrote:
| I mean, is that legally possible to do? If they make
| information freely available on their website how are they
| legally able to control how that information is used? That
| seems kind of ridiculous to me.
| maxmorlocke wrote:
| Disclaimer: Founder of a company in the travel space that
| relies heavily on scraping.
|
| What's interesting here is that there's conflicting
| precedent... and fundamentally that is what matters. hiQ vs
| LinkedIn is a great example of accessing data via a scraper
| that potentially violates the Terms of Services agreement, but
| found that Microsoft/LinkedIn violated antitrust laws. EF
| Cultural Travel vs Explorica is another example favoring
| scrapers. Against that, you have Facebook vs Power.com.
| Speaking personally, I'd like for clear and explicit rules
| about what is kosher to scrape and what isn't. Ticket bots are
| clearly problematic and deserve to burn in hell. Overly
| aggressive scrapers that incur load shouldn't get a free ride,
| but stuff like this that is initiated at the client's request
| and accessing solely the client's data.... I personally believe
| this should be fair use and would like to see that show up in
| the law somewhere.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| A fair test would be that if you are able to delegate
| manually retrieving the information to a friend or colleague,
| you should be allowed to delegate it to a machine.
| samschooler wrote:
| Its going to be similar to this suit [0] with Linkedin which
| they lost. The only difference is the data is behind an auth
| wall which linkedin's content wasn't.
|
| [0]: https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/supreme-court-
| scra...
| noitpmeder wrote:
| I thought the fact that LinkedIn's content was _not_ behind a
| paywall was the main point. E.g. it's fine to scrape whatever
| they did from LinkedIn because it was public to all.
| tzs wrote:
| Not so fast. Who is "you"?
|
| If I'm understanding the situation correctly (which I may not
| be) it is AA rewards members who are using TPG's app to access
| the site. These people give the TPG app their AA login
| information so it can login to their AA account to get their
| information.
|
| Arguably it is these AA rewards members who are scraping the
| site. TPG just supplied the tool those members are using. It
| would then be the AA rewards members who are the ones who have
| a contract with the site, not TPG.
| [deleted]
| Buge wrote:
| Not all information is copyrightable. Just because there's a
| copyright notice doesn't mean there's actually a copyright.
| gjs278 wrote:
| ACow_Adonis wrote:
| If I hang a book on a public street and put on the first page
| "if you read from this book you owe me money and if you use the
| information contained within I will sue you because it's all
| mine", it's not at all cut and dried. indeed I think a lot of
| people would note it sounds like bullshit.
|
| And additional observation is that they're claiming ownership
| and exclusive rights to things over things which:
|
| a) as broken and dystopian as our intellectual property laws
| are, it's not immediately apparent you can claim exclusive
| ownership of. Can you claim property rights on a pin number? on
| your customer's name? on your customer's phone number? is data
| even ownable?
|
| b) as above, even if you could, it's not apparent that the
| airline is the one with the greatest claim to that ownership.
| Does the airline own my name if I fly with them?
|
| c) the issue with screen scraping may just be scale, automation
| and commercial value, and it's not apparent you can just
| wilfully ban competitors from that because you say so. Indeed,
| is it a violation if an individual uses the information within
| without screen scraping? cause a lot of those exclusions and
| terms would seem like they restrict the use of the website and
| the information for its actual intended purpose on an
| individual level, screen scraping or not.
|
| d) what are we doing when we read a website but biological
| screen scraping?
| datastoat wrote:
| When I scrape, I attach a header that says roughly "By
| responding to this request, the provider allows me to use the
| response for my own personal use; and accepts that this
| overrides any terms stated on the web page."
|
| Cut and dried? A lawyer friend told me, informally, that if it
| went to court a younger judge would throw out my "contract"
| because it's silly, but a more senior judge might well take the
| view that both contracts, my version and that of the web site,
| are equally silly, and both fall short of the "meeting of
| minds" standard.
| [deleted]
| icehawk wrote:
| The funny thing is, American sends points data to my email. I
| wonder if that sort of thing could be leveraged for something
| similar.
| nunez wrote:
| This is how AwardWallet gets around Delta's ban on scraping.
| Forward your award summaries to them; they parse it and put it
| into their platform.
| chrischen wrote:
| Award wallet parses these emails as a workaround to the legal
| threats.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| If it worked for AWS bills.. :)
| oh_sigh wrote:
| I wonder if Amazon was worried about companies like Google
| mining sales data from emails? Or something along those lines
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| fault1 wrote:
| I think this was precisely the issue.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Shopify offers to track packages if you link your email, so
| i assume it could be related.
| chrischen wrote:
| They do the same thing to Award wallet even though award wallet
| uses s browser extension to browse the website in your actual
| browser.
| supercanuck wrote:
| One thing that has changed in the airline industry that wasn't
| the case when the points guy started, is that the Airline
| Frequent flier miles are worth more than the actual airline
| themselves making the airlines essentially banks.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggUduBmvQ_4
| yuy910616 wrote:
| I can't seem to find a reason why "screen scraping" is important
| here, as oppose to just scraping?
|
| My understanding is that screen scraping is taking a picture of
| the rendered website and using an OCR or some other sort of
| recognition tools to extract the data.
|
| If it is just scraping - it should be perfectly legal right?
| GordonS wrote:
| Screen scraping isn't exclusively about using OCR - it more
| usually means parsing text content from HTML.
| TameAntelope wrote:
| What's the "screen" part of this, though? I guess if you have
| to render the page fully (execute the JS as well), rather
| than just parse the returned HTML, that to me is more "screen
| scraping" vs. "scraping".
| paxys wrote:
| Who says it is? This is about copying alleged proprietary and
| copyrighted content from a website. The technique used isn't
| really relevant.
| whatshisface wrote:
| It's against their ToS. The court is trying to decide what kind
| of a contract a ToS is. This will have implications for anyone
| writing software covered under a ToS... and anyone using it.
| TuringTest wrote:
| The 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 somewhat
| standardized APIs, but the browser or native app is developed by
| the same vendor and serves their commercial interests, not those
| of the user as a customer. The only standard customization
| recognized to users is light theme / dark theme, and it has only
| started a few months ago.
| judge2020 wrote:
| The reality is that every company wants to have things
| presented in the same way they're prepared, for the purposes of
| marketing. That's why web browsers with css are a thing at all
| - to allow a website to look exactly like what the
| developer/company behind it wants it to look like.
|
| Why would any company provide data in a standard API so that
| users can use that data in a standard way? If there was an API
| for banking, Bank of America wouldn't be able to showcase a
| professional-esque design and Sofi wouldn't be able to showcase
| a cartoonish modern design to strengthen their image and
| attract customers. How do they then attract customers? Only by
| features and lower margins, which is the opposite of what would
| make them money.
| TuringTest wrote:
| Remember that the original vision for the web was not made
| for _companies_ , but for academic or government
| institutions.
|
| The idea was to have computers support users, not customers.
| These words have become synonyms but they have quite
| different implications. The stated goal was to _augment the
| human intellect_ , for which you need a well organized corpus
| of knowledge (think Wikipedia, whose spectacular growth and
| supporting community came from _not being a commercial
| initiative_ ).
|
| But nowadays the whole industry is focused around building
| _products and services_ that can be _packaged and sold_ , to
| the point that its professionals can't even think of any
| other possibilities when discussing the characteristics of
| the ecosystem.
|
| Incentives are completely different; it's no wonder that
| interests of industry are misaligned with actual needs of the
| final users.
| hypertele-Xii wrote:
| The customer is an advertizer. The humans browsing the web are
| the product being sold.
| TuringTest wrote:
| Yes, that's what caused it: turning it into a market instead
| of a library.
|
| When it was built by geeks, it was difficult to use but it
| was meant to serve people. Sellers turned "serving people"
| into _that other_ meaning.
| smsm42 wrote:
| The market is not the problem. The misaligned setup of the
| market, where the interests of the most of the consumers
| are misaligned with interests of those who produces or pays
| for the content, is the problem. Imagine a grocery store
| which is actually a money laundering front for mafia, so
| it's much more interested in looking like a grocery store
| than actually selling any groceries. Do you think they'd
| sell high quality goods? Would they have the best prices?
| Would their customer service be excellent? Now imagine the
| mafia bought _all_ (or almost all) grocery stores in town
| and turned them into money laundering outlets. How is your
| grocery shopping experience now? That 's what we're having
| with ads.
| balls187 wrote:
| I can't see how American Airlines will prevail in preventing
| screen scraping. At best, they can prevent their point data from
| being transmitted and stored to TPG's servers.
|
| Screen Scraping is essentially interacting with the DOM extract
| information. American Airlines can't conceivably attempt to limit
| programmatic interaction with the DOM because that is a core
| component of how the web works including accessibility tools such
| as screen readers, and browser plugins/extensions.
| jrockway wrote:
| I wouldn't put it past the court system to make web browsers
| ("user agents" as we called them back in the day) illegal
| accidentally. I'd be more surprised if they didn't, honestly.
| balls187 wrote:
| > I wouldn't put it past the court system to make web
| browsers
|
| I agree.
|
| My faith would be upon appeal or enforcement, such a ruling
| would get overturned, or dismissed.
| pmastela wrote:
| Gotta love Streisand Effect. I did not know TPG had an app, and
| now it's on my Home Screen. Thanks, AA!
| smsm42 wrote:
| iphone only though. Apparently Android users aren't big enough
| market to bother.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| In the status symbol-y world of $20k first class airline
| suites, $1,500/night overwater bungalows, and $695/year
| credit cards, that's probably true.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| 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.
| lianna-vba wrote:
| That's a good point about awareness of sites with affiliate
| links. Doctor of Credit and https://www.frequentmiler.com are
| my top two, though there's overlap between them. Doctor of
| Credit has the best credit card, bank and brokerage sign up
| bonus lists and Frequent Miler has good point redemption
| guides.
| mitquinn wrote:
| 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..
| enos_feedler wrote:
| 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 the weeks it took to fix
| my account it was pretty frustrating. I just don't understand why
| you can't write a script that acts as your web user agent.
| Beached wrote:
| at a previous employer we had a similar issue as you. from the
| employer side, we had a managed api platform that normalized
| all our messy data stores into a single api front end. our
| websites basically all called this api to populate the data in
| the page requests.
|
| except we didn't write this platform, we paid for it. and it is
| licensed per 100 queries.
|
| so when. a single account starts doing 30k queries every hour,
| 24/7. the pocketbook was directly hit. and yes, web scraping
| was in the tos that every account agreed to but never read
| lowercased wrote:
| "agents" and "bots" were proposed as a thing of the future back
| in the 90s. "you'll have all these agents that can buy stuff
| for you and book travel and ..."
|
| but not if you write it yourself, apparently.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| And they are still a growing thing in business with RPA. I
| guess consumers aren't allowed to access the technology
| afforded to enterprise employees.
| folkhack wrote:
| > I guess consumers aren't allowed to access the technology
| afforded to enterprise employees.
|
| Lots of us built our own stacks and attempt to fly under
| the radar - things have gotten legally gray over the last
| two years and corporations have no problem sending their
| legal team to kick your door down for trivial stuff.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| 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 a
| single user.
|
| Another common problem was forgetting to implement reasonable
| back off for failures. A lot of newbies write scripts that
| immediately retry on a tight infinite loop whenever something
| goes wrong, sending a huge stream of requests to your server if
| the API changes or when it goes down. Again, multiply this by
| many users sharing a script and it becomes a problem.
|
| Then of course there are people trying to make a business out
| of extracting your company's data, such as putting it in some
| other website where they can serve ads over your content or
| whatever (think of all of those StackOverflow scraping websites
| in Google)
|
| Basically, you can't investigate the motivations of each
| individual user. You just block them all.
| jdhawk wrote:
| https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/429
| Scoundreller wrote:
| > think of all of those StackOverflow scraping websites in
| Google
|
| You don't need to scrape stack overflow, you can just
| download a .zip
|
| That's one reason why people use it: they can't just gate you
| off from the content you've created. You and others can (and
| will/do) have a copy of it all.
|
| https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/295508/download-
| sta...
| jessriedel wrote:
| Thanks much for the info.
|
| Why can't you just ignore API requests once it exceeds a
| threshold rate?
| kmeisthax wrote:
| For the specific use-case of "badly written scrapers", this
| _might_ be reasonable, but usually by the point when
| engineering needs to care about scrapers, other people at
| the company are involved and just view it as a service
| theft issue. i.e. "Why waste time and money forcing people
| to scrape fairly when we can just ban all scrapers?"
|
| Not to mention, actually malicious traffic will find any
| non-Sybil criterion you use to enforce rate limits and work
| around it. "Enforce rate limits per User-Agent?" I'm now
| 10,000 different applications. "Enforce rate limits per IP
| address?" I'm now 10,000 different compromised residential
| IP addresses. At some point, distinguishing between well-
| behaved, buggy-but-legitimate, and outright malicious
| automated traffic is either impossible or too time-
| consuming. Upon which point you throw up your hands and
| say, "Screw it, everyone but Google or a browser is
| banned."
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| > Then of course there are people trying to make a business
| out of extracting your company's data,
|
| If I can do this by hand there's no legal reason I can't do
| it by machine. You can try to defend against it, I guess, but
| the second you start impacting your obligations to someone
| else (like disabling their account after they paid you) you
| are in the wrong.
| [deleted]
| goda90 wrote:
| Reminds me of a little battle I got into years ago at work.
| The thermostat covered like 4 or 5 offices, and they had
| given us a control to change it on an internal website. It
| would record your name when you changed it, and then make you
| wait like 10 minutes to change it again. When I first moved
| into the office, I noticed that there was a battle between
| two people that had it doing several degree swings all day
| long. I sent them both and email and proposed a truce with a
| temperature in the middle, and they agreed. A few weeks later
| I noticed the guy who preferred it warmer broke the truce. I
| do not like it warm. So I wrote a script that would reload
| the page, check if the temperature was above a certain
| number, hit the down button, wait 10 minutes, then repeat.
| Some time after that, it became obvious that the other guy
| had a script too. But his script had no timeouts in the loop.
| Eventually the people in charge of the internal site emailed
| me and asked me to stop. They said they only noticed I was
| using a script because the other guy's script was breaking
| the website, and they looked at the logs and saw my
| responsible script reacting to it all night long. My manager
| laughed and told me to make the script more human-like. The
| other guy gave up his temperature tyranny and I let it sit at
| the truce point again.
| scoot wrote:
| So, basically, you forgot to rate limit your API?
| enos_feedler wrote:
| Makes sense. Thanks for this context.
| listenallyall wrote:
| 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.
| heydonovan wrote:
| You beat me to it, was going to say the same. It's always a
| few bad actors that try and hammer our servers, gets annoying
| real fast. I'd honestly block them and move on, I don't have
| time to investigate every single request. Now to sue someone?
| That seems like a waste of everyone's time.
| ethbr0 wrote:
| 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.
| KieranMac wrote:
| 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 need to win the jurisdictional
| question of whether the case will be decided in Delaware or
| Texas.
| hlbjhblbljib wrote:
| I'm surprised more businesses don't ban all of Texas as
| customers to prevent any litigation happening there.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads into regional flamewar.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| beauzero wrote:
| It's the second most populous (~29M) state behind California.
| artificial wrote:
| Businesses sue? Blame customers! In order to save the village
| we had to destroy the village! There needs to be some massive
| reforms, especially with copyright.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I'm surprised more businesses don't ban all of Texas as
| customers to prevent any litigation happening there.
|
| Businesses are often the ones structuring agreements so that
| they can sue customers there and so that customers are forced
| to sue them there, so...that would seem counterproductive.
|
| Even before considering the size of the market you'd be
| cutting off.
| randrews wrote:
| American Airlines' headquarters is in Fort Worth, so banning
| Texas customers would be a peculiar move...
| throwawaygh wrote:
| In this case, it would be TPM banning Texas customers,
| since Texas is the favorable venue for AA.
|
| That doesn't seem like as big a deal, since TPM doesn't
| have a giant corporate headquarters to relocate and can
| cutting Texas from the TAM isn't that big of a deal.
| paxys wrote:
| Banning the second largest user base in the country isn't
| usually a good business strategy
| rhizome wrote:
| It's funny how regionalism pops up on the internet. Thing
| is, it's less than 10% of the country (and surely not all
| of those 29MM are on the internet), and there are other
| businesses surviving just fine foregoing a TAM of the whole
| country.
| ksdale wrote:
| How can you be so sure it's not regionalism that's
| causing you to dismiss nearly 10% of one of the largest,
| richest countries in the world as inconsequential?
| throwawaygh wrote:
| The top comment is from a legal expert basically saying
| that TPM's success in this lawsuit depends on avoiding
| Texas a jurisdiction, and the product in question is not
| possible without winning this lawsuit.
|
| It's not that Texas is inconsequential. It's that the
| choice is "cut off Texas or risk the entire business in
| the other 49 states".
| sneak wrote:
| Not all users are created equal. This is why many internet
| businesses cater exclusively to a wealthy country that
| contains only 6% (that is, excluding 94% of internet users)
| of the people on the internet.
| tuckerconnelly wrote:
| Kieran! Kieran (OP) is a friend of mine, highly competent, and
| I highly recommend his comprehensive legal guide to web
| scraping: https://mccarthygarberlaw.com/a-comprehensive-legal-
| guide-to...
| sneak wrote:
| ape4 wrote:
| Just for fun, here is the robots.txt from that site:
| # Default robots file version:2 User-agent: \*
| Disallow: /calendar/action\* Disallow:
| /events/action\* Allow: /*.css Allow: /*.js
| Disallow: /\*? Crawl-delay: 3 Sitemap:
| https://mccarthygarberlaw.com/sitemap_index.xml
| divbzero wrote:
| Thank you sharing the link. I find it amusingly appropriate
| that viewing this legal guide requires agreeing to Terms &
| Conditions, but appreciate that it's one of the shortest
| Terms & Conditions I've ever seen easy to read and understand
| within seconds.
| KieranMac wrote:
| Haha! Given that the article is about scraping, I figured
| some prudence with respect to people copying and pasting my
| work somewhere else was warranted!
| KieranMac wrote:
| Thanks, Tucker!
| smsm42 wrote:
| I wonder if other services like Mint, Yodelee etc. also do
| scraping? It seems to be the same model there as TPG/AA - a
| company has user data, but the user wants the data in some other
| place, so they authorize a third-party to extract the data and
| represent it in a different place. Most banks now are
| begrudgingly coming to terms with this being a thing, some going
| as far as providing OAuth-like read-only APIs to aggregators.
| Some are trying hard to not let that happen, and some just ignore
| the issue and let the aggregators scrape. But an actual case
| decision in this matter could change the picture - and make
| financial aggregator business so much harder if it's going a
| wrong way.
| paxys wrote:
| 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?
|
| FYI the title is editorialized. This suit has nothing to do with
| screen scraping, but just data access in general. Services like
| these nowadays almost always use private APIs (built for mobile
| clients and SPAs) rather than parse HTML.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| I don't this matters, from a legal standpoint.
|
| The issue isn't whether or not it's what the customers wanted.
| The issue is that TPG wasn't the party that entered into the
| agreement with AA when creating the account.
|
| I'm not suggesting it's right or wrong, but that's the issue.
| Glyptodon wrote:
| 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.
| mbreese wrote:
| But if TPG is an agent of the customer, then AA should be
| suing the customer. As said above, TPG isn't subject to the
| TOS because they aren't the ones who agreed to them. So,
| it's the user that is misusing AAs data. But they don't
| want to sue their customers (and in particular each
| customer individually, because I'm sure there is a no-
| class-action clause)...
|
| So here we are. It should be fascinating to see where this
| goes.
| tiahura wrote:
| _But if TPG is an agent of the customer, then AA should
| be suing the customer._
|
| As the great Professor Hecker repeated so often in
| Business Associations - "The tortfeasor is always
| liable." E.g. when you get hit by the Dominoes delivery
| driver, you can sue the delivery driver.
| rhizome wrote:
| I was just looking at this in the context of the Rogel
| Aguilera-Mederos (110 year sentence) truck-crash case the
| other week. IANAL, but as I understand it there's a legal
| concept called "respondeat superior" and the "McHaffie
| Rule" that may complicate that assertion. A lawyer could
| and probably would stomp me on this description,
| naturally.
| tiahura wrote:
| Respondeat superior means the employer is _also_ liable,
| not solely liable. Again, the tortfeasor is always
| liable. Iaal.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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 principal for
| the same purpose.
|
| When the first and third of those are reversed and the
| second is unclear (which seems to be the case here), you
| want to focus on the agent. You could sue the multitude
| of principals, too, but that's just a lot more cost for
| little additional benefit (and possibly sympathy backfire
| in a jury trial.)
| backtoyoujim wrote:
| How does that logic apply to people that sublet rental
| spaces ?
| adrianba wrote:
| Subletting isn't an agency relationship. It's not like
| tenants provide a service to landlords by occupying the
| property as well as paying rent.
|
| Also, the law around real property including leases is
| different and more involved than straightforward
| contractual relationships.
| alexpotato wrote:
| Some leases specify that sub letting is not allowed and
| doing some would put the original tenant in breach of the
| lease agreement.
| dylan604 wrote:
| I'd even say most leases vs some, especially regarding
| residential. Buying a house for the purposes of renting
| requires different financing (although most are being
| bought for cash) than a typical homeowner's financing
| which has clauses that says the person receiving the
| financing will use the address as their primary
| residence.
|
| These things get ridiculously specific.
| gowld wrote:
| What happens if you hire someone to be your agent at your
| job?
| Glyptodon wrote:
| They should arbitrage the difference between our pay to
| replace me and get me fired.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Typically, aren't new contracts drawn up so that the
| person you hired is recognized on the other end as well?
| nybble41 wrote:
| > 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-party app actually counts
| as sharing it with that party. How exactly would this be
| different logging in from a web browser? It's just a different
| kind of user agent. Are Google, Mozilla, Microsoft, and Apple
| guilty of tortious interference simply because the software
| they release has access to your passwords on your own machine
| and _could_ report them back? (For that matter, they even store
| the synced passwords on _their_ servers, though in principle
| those are supposed to be private.)
|
| Of course there could also be specific terms in the TOS against
| accessing the service with unapproved user agents, independent
| of any prohibition on sharing credentials.
| KieranMac wrote:
| American Airlines is alleging 12 legal claims:
|
| 1. Breach of Contract 2. Tortious Interference with a
| Contract 3. Unfair Competition by Misappropriation 4.
| Trespass 5. Trademark infringement 6. Dilution 7. Dilution
| under Texas State Law 8. False Designation of Origin 9.
| Copyright Infringement 10. CFAA 11. Violation of Texas
| Harmful Access by Computer Act 12. Unjust Enrichment
| akersten wrote:
| IMO it would serve the common person well if we changed the
| way the law works so that if a corporation sues you for a
| laundry list of things, if a single claim gets thrown out,
| then they all do. That prevents this insane pile-on where a
| half-afternoon's work by 4 people in their giant legal
| department turns into a multi-year nightmare for an average
| citizen. I think that would be a fair way to reign in the
| corporate "throw everything at the wall, see what sticks,
| or at least hope we intimidate this regular Joe into
| submission" approach that's all too common today.
| tedunangst wrote:
| Meh, Red Ventures' estimated $11 billion valuation is
| slightly more than AA's market cap.
| paxys wrote:
| Curious how Breach of Contract can fly, considering TPG
| never agreed to a contract with AA to begin with. And AA is
| obviously not suing their own customers.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > 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").
|
| They specifically claim it's presenting something that is
| intentionally confusingly similar to an official AA logon
| screen using copyrighted and trademarked AA content to
| harvest customer username and password info, does not
| prominently note it's nonaffiliation with AA, and directly
| violates the TOS itself, as well as arguing tortious
| interference, copyright infringement, trademark infringement,
| trademark dilution, and violation of the CFAA and the Texas
| equivalent.
|
| They also note a similar dispute settled with a separate firm
| owned by the same parent before TPG tried to negotiate a deal
| with AA for permission to access customer data for this
| purpose and was turned down.
| whiddershins wrote:
| So I wonder what if any legal difference there would be if
| TPG was only providing a web app that runs in the browser.
| staticassertion wrote:
| I doubt that part of a TOS is enforceable as it restricts
| speech.
|
| edit: No it doesn't, brain fart.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I doubt that part of a TOS is enforceable as it restricts
| speech.
|
| Contractual restrictions on speech are enforceable.
| xmprt wrote:
| For a simpler example, think of NDAs
| iso1631 wrote:
| What law says someone can't restrict free speech?
| paxys wrote:
| RIP password managers then, I guess
| xbar wrote:
| Yes. And iCloud-based Safari-storage of passwords for all
| iPhone users.
| paxprose wrote:
| And every piece of financial software that does anything
| with your banking information.
| nwiswell wrote:
| > 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.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| endofreach wrote:
| 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.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Tangent: pwn is always a misspelling of own. Granted,
| intentional meme usage is almost entirely limited to the
| "conquer" metaphor, but unintentional usage wouldn't have
| that same restriction/implication.
| sithadmin wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| 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?
| pishpash wrote:
| They could (conceivably) if Google touted using their
| browser to access said website despite all this, especially
| if Google derived some benefit from it. It may well not
| come down to making available a tool, but to knowingly
| encouraging the breaking of ToS (assuming it's valid in the
| first place).
| tiahura wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| 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.
| Tostino wrote:
| That should simply not be enforceable, period. If we had any
| consumer advocacy in government in the US, this BS would have
| never even come up.
| tiahura wrote:
| The US was formed under the premises that adults have the
| right to make their own decisions - good and bad, and that
| adults are the masters of their own property.
|
| I think these principles have served us pretty well despite
| the violations of human dignity like not being able to
| check your AA points from the TPG app.
| dylan604 wrote:
| At the same time, doesn't AA have the right to protect
| themselves from potential abuse? I don't have a problem
| at all saying that I'm not supposed to share my
| credentials with 3rd parties. The user has no control
| over what the 3rd party might do, and can only make that
| decision based on what they think they are going to be
| doing.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > The US was formed under the premises that adults have
| the right to make their own decisions - good and bad, and
| that adults are the masters of their own property.
|
| Yes, and AA servers, copyrights, and trademarks are all,
| under the law, it's property, of which it is master.
|
| That's kind of the whole basis of the lawsuit.
| im3w1l wrote:
| I'm surprised that an affiliate marketing company is willing to
| get in such a fight. Like I would have thought everything they
| did was blessed and even paid for by airlines and credit cards.
| ceejayoz wrote:
| There may be a tension between AA and Citi, who provides the
| cards and likely shoulders the costs of the various signon
| bonuses and benefits out of their card revenue.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Why the headline editorialization? "Is screen scraping illegal"
| isn't in the article headline and scree-scraping isn't mentioned
| by name. And this case doesn't appear to be generic screen-
| scraping of a public site, as TPG was using customer credentials
| to log-in and retrieve info (with permission). The lawsuit is
| about breach of site T&C.
| throwaway_b04f wrote:
| 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 sink you. I guess they
| took that warning to heart.
| PragmaticPulp wrote:
| For some perspective: This isn't just about friendly apps like
| TPG helping consumers out. If you have an API (or even just
| turn a blind eye to scraping) and have a popular service,
| scores of ill-intentioned business people will descend on your
| business to suck any value they can out of it.
|
| This ranges from all of those StackOverflow scraping websites
| in your Google search results to companies that want to scrape
| Facebook for images and personal info to build a database of
| everyone.
| RobSm wrote:
| And if I open the website in my browser and then copy from
| browser to my computer, then all is good?
| e4e78a06 wrote:
| 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.
| smsm42 wrote:
| 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.
| alfalfasprout wrote:
| While surgery may not be a commodity, the same mechanisms
| of price discovery lowering prices across the board apply.
| Even if a surgeon is more skilled, are they worth 3x the
| cost?
| e4e78a06 wrote:
| Definitely, but if I'm comparing primary care providers in
| the same area between Kaiser and Hoag and Sutter or other
| large chains there isn't going to be much difference in
| service between the pool of available doctors at each one.
| Or even routine specialists for non-critical stuff like
| dermatology, you don't get any better care by going with
| the best. Where it matters is cutting edge, critical care
| like cardiology, oncology, and surgery where methods aren't
| standardized and individual skill (as opposed to drug
| innovation) plays a large role in outcomes.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| I'd guess most healthcare services are more like a
| commodity than not. (Also, to the extent that there is
| important variation in quality of service, it's probably
| the nursing staff that matters for the vast majority of
| services. I can't remember the last time I interacted with
| an actual MD for more than a few useless minutes.)
| network2592 wrote:
| 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.
| enos_feedler wrote:
| 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.
| network2592 wrote:
| At the very least, data obfuscation obfuscates the
| shenanigans of a constantly asymmetrically redefined
| value store.
|
| TPG just highlights the shenanigans which puts pressure
| on airlines to change the value even more frequently.
| This in turn makes the shenanigans more apparent which
| might call for regulation.
|
| This lawsuit is attempting to nip this process in the bud
| before stumbling on regulation. But, fundamentally, the
| relationship is asymmetric regardless of any data api
| access.
| anon3970970 wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trespass_to_chattels
| bredren wrote:
| This question about whether a consumer has a right to enjoy
| access to information or already paid for services without being
| advertised to is being tested in businesses everywhere.
|
| Streaming services insert ads for other original content when you
| hit play.
|
| The grocery store has audio and video advertisements for prepare
| meals playing on loop you can not avoid if you walk past the meat
| department.
|
| The problem is a race to the bottom on the pricing consumers
| perceive, and then recovering that money by squeezing every
| possible touch point.
|
| People have to have enough options to choose a company that
| doesn't have to make these compromises.
| rising-sky wrote:
| "Partly" reminds me of LinkedIn's case against hiQ
|
| > The LinkedIn dispute arose out of hiQ's use of automated bots
| to scrape massive amounts of information from publicly available
| LinkedIn user profiles. Thus far, lower courts have sided with
| hiQ on grounds that certain information on the site is publicly
| available and could be accessed by the public without entering a
| password. [1]
|
| There are similarities, however, different context in that in
| hiQ's case, information was publicly available, but in TPG's case
| the owner of that data (the AA customer) is providing them access
| to the data. The customer could just as well copy / download /
| screenshot the data, etc, and transfer it to TPG, obviously most
| people wouldn't bother, so that should be the core of the
| argument here. Is a user allowed to make their data available to
| a third-party? Screen-scraping is a means to an end
|
| [1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/supreme-court-
| scra...
| friendlydog wrote:
| If it isn't search engines and news aggregators are illegal.
| dancocos wrote:
| The airline industry has been through this before
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping#United_States
| tomohawk wrote:
| It doesn't matter if it is illegal. The process is the punishment
| in the US.
|
| Unlike every other OECD country, the US does not have the English
| Rule.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_rule_%28attorney%27s_f...
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| data yearns to be free
| [deleted]
| KieranMac wrote:
| Someone asked "what is their case, exactly?"
|
| American Airlines is alleging 12 legal claims:
|
| 1. Breach of Contract 2. Tortious Interference with a Contract 3.
| Unfair Competition by Misappropriation 4. Trespass 5. Trademark
| infringement 6. Dilution 7. Dilution under Texas State Law 8.
| False Designation of Origin 9. Copyright Infringement 10. CFAA
| 11. Violation of Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act 12. Unjust
| Enrichment
| listenallyall wrote:
| "Illegal" is the headline is the wrong word here. There are no
| criminal proceedings, just a civil case. Breach of contract is
| all that is being alleged here.
| BoysenberryPi wrote:
| If screen scraping is illegal just know that pretty much every
| budget and banking app is also illegal because they all use
| screen scraping.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Plaid and the like now have API agreements with many of the
| major US banks, and are cutting down on their scraping usage
| (because its obviously unsustainable).
| BoysenberryPi wrote:
| I would like to know who "the like" include because as far as
| I know it's just Plaid and maybe Intuit doing this. Until
| banks provide APIs directly to developers this just gives
| Plaid a monopoly. All devs who want to make finance apps
| securely have to go through Plaid.
| nunez wrote:
| They also went after AwardWallet and told them to shut it down.
|
| Y'all, think of the poor servers! They can't handle the
| traffic!!! /s
| Nextgrid wrote:
| > 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 all.
| a45a33s wrote:
| I always liked this bit:
|
| "Industry could not benefit from its increased productivity
| without a substantial increase in consumer spending. This
| contributed to the development of mass marketing designed to
| influence the population's economic behavior on a larger
| scale.[24] "
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advertising#20th_century
| [deleted]
| bradly wrote:
| Was it Ray Bradbury that said something like the only
| difference between the rich and the poor in the future will be
| the number of ads they see?
| loceng wrote:
| Specifically the airline industry, all industrial complexes, or
| adapting/adjusting copyright and intellectual property laws?
|
| Edit to add: Do you really have to downvote, don't you have
| something better to do with your click?
| vineyardmike wrote:
| i assume they mean advertising.
| loceng wrote:
| Ah thanks, I didn't catch that aspect at first - threw off
| my interpretation.
| [deleted]
| alexpotato wrote:
| Or at least offer an option to pay to remove the annoyances.
|
| HBO was a great example of this in the pre-streaming days.
|
| "Want to see great shows and movies with no commercials, pay
| the extra for cable + HBO and you won't have to seem them
| again.!"
|
| This default, "it's all free BUT you have to see ads and there
| are no alternatives" seems to be the problem. The apps
| described in the article are effectively recognizing this
| consumer surplus/need and acting on it.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| It doesn't work. Paying to avoid ads makes you more valuable
| to advertisers. They will offer more money for your attention
| and some executives will eventually think they're leaving
| money on the table by not doing it.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| The problem with advertising is that the price of an ad view
| directly correlates with how wealthy the viewer is. Being
| able to opt-out would essentially make the advertising
| platform worthless as the only audience would be broke people
| who can't afford to pay to opt-out and are thus very unlikely
| to be able to afford your product.
|
| The only way would be if regulation either mandates a
| reasonably-priced ad-free tier (priced at the average revenue
| from an ad-viewing user) or other restrictions (GDPR but
| actually enforced, the website being liable for the ads it
| shows, etc) that would make advertising completely
| unprofitable.
|
| > The apps described in the article are effectively
| recognizing this consumer surplus/need and acting on it.
|
| Presumably, AA is pissed off because the people that value
| their time enough and have the skills to set up and use an
| alternative are people they'd very much want looking at their
| ads, much more so than the plebs who already use the website
| and see the ads.
| learc83 wrote:
| 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" ads. Then the
| definition of a few gets larger and larger.
| asxd wrote:
| > 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?
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Outside of a very few markets that prey on desperate
| people's last dollars (payday loans, etc), most
| advertising's objective is to get people to buy something
| - advertising to those who can't afford it is useless.
| kryogen1c wrote:
| > Imagine how more efficient things could be if this cancer was
| eradicated once and for all.
|
| people dont like paying and they dont mind ads. they enable a
| lot of products and services that would otherwise not exist.
| ads might be a net negative, but they certainly have at least
| some positives.
| ativzzz wrote:
| 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 against
| our rules. You also have the choice not to fly AA.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| It's pretty outrageous that to fly with a given airlines you
| give up X many rights of online use.
|
| This seems to fit the definition of an unconscionable
| contract pretty well.
|
| See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unconscionability
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Their servers are their own private spaces. That's the line.
| I will not do anything that subverts their control of their
| own computers. I will not make their servers execute my code.
| Their website, however, is just data they sent to _my_
| computer.
|
| They have exactly zero right to dictate what I do on my
| computer. Their HTML is being rendered on my computer and I
| absolutely reserve the right to delete or modify elements in
| any way and for any reason. Their javascript is executing on
| my computer and I absolutely reserve the right to delete and
| modify functions if I deem necessary.
| dkonofalski wrote:
| 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.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| > 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?
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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 be if this cancer was
| eradicated once and for all.
|
| Yes!! What I wouldn't give to see this entire industry banned
| from existence. It would solve so many problems it's
| ridiculous.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| 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!
| arcticbull wrote:
| 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 has made a
| successful micropayments based product or platform. Further,
| simply paywalling software or services means 99% of people
| will not use it. People also are uncomfortable with a system
| that just withdraws money from their account to pay people -
| and a universal subscription model isn't particularly tenable
| due to the competing interests of market participants.
|
| If you can solve this problem with something other than ads,
| I will be your first investor because you're going to be the
| richest human on earth.
|
| It's easy to say "ads bad" - ok, but the real question is
| what are we going to replace them with?
| bobthepanda wrote:
| I will say, I find it interesting that newspapers never
| developed an equivalent to "the daily paper."
|
| Even in the 2000s I remember newspapers not costing more
| than a dollar or two. I would personally prefer a one-off
| payment of some small amount to get the website for the day
| or X amount of articles instead of some god-awful
| subscription that has to be cancelled via some shitty call
| center process where they try to stop you twenty times.
| alexpotato wrote:
| > 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?
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Easy - they paid for cable because it was an orange to
| OTA's apples. You'd only get a few OTA channels, and even
| then, not all of them would come in clearly. People paid
| for cable because it offered more channels. Most channels
| would still show commercials. Relatively few paid for
| premium channels, but it wasn't because they were
| commercial free (they were), it was because they offered
| better content (newest movies), in a time when piracy
| wasn't nearly as accessible.
| adventured wrote:
| > 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 worth $... today and
| Netflix is worth $226 billion. If people would pay so
| much for eg blogs (or, again, any other comparable
| content), there'd be a $100 billion company extracting
| that monthly payment for producing volumes of written
| content on websites. Some blog network would have
| actually succeeded and become a global content
| juggernaut.
|
| Most of the content online is not of high quality and
| people will not pay for it, or they'll pay so little for
| it as to be a sad joke.
|
| Which website compares to the joy and value people
| extracted from Friends, Seinfeld, MASH, Fresh Prince, I
| Love Lucy, and dozens of other prominent TV shows from
| the past ~50 years. Much less the even higher production
| shows like Sopranos or Game of Thrones. There may be a
| select few and they're billion dollar services like
| Reddit with huge volumes of low value content. Do
| millions of people still talk lovingly about some
| websites from 2006 like they do decades later about I
| Love Lucy? Hell no they don't, only a tiny niche group of
| people does that.
|
| People go back and watch movies over and over again for
| decades. They listen to the same songs/bands/albums
| regularly for decades.
|
| Does the average person go back and dig up long dead
| websites and go through them start to finish on
| Archive.org, like they do old TV shows they enjoyed
| (Quantum Leap, ALF, Golden Girls, whatever). Hell no they
| don't, again, only a very very tiny group of people would
| do such a thing.
|
| Most online text content is not very entertaining, even
| in the best case scenarios, that's the difference between
| the concepts.
|
| Is there lots of funny, amusing, entertaining text
| content on eg Reddit? You bet. And people will pay
| pennies for it - if at all - because it's of low value
| compared to high quality, higher production value
| entertainment. They'll pay what it's worth, a pittance.
| arcticbull wrote:
| Exclusive content. That's why I pay for HBO anyways.
| Fwirt wrote:
| Cable channels were also subsidized by advertising. You
| pay a decent amount of money per month to get access to
| exclusive content, but that cost still doesn't cover the
| costs of producing the media. If cable bills were double
| or triple the price, even without ads, many people
| probably would have been pushed to "free" TV.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > It's easy to say "ads bad" - ok, but the real question is
| what are we going to replace them with?
|
| I don't know and at this point I don't think it even
| matters. Every single time I discuss ads here on HN I learn
| new reasons to hate it. Some days ago I read a story about
| a politician who deliberately slowed down traffic so people
| would be forced to "contemplate" this garbage. The sheer
| audacity of these people never fails to impress me.
|
| It's irredeemable and the fact that there's currently no
| alternative is no reason not to get rid of it. We really
| should just do it and let the chips fall where they may.
| People _will_ figure out a way to make money. They have to,
| because the alternative is to go bankrupt. Maybe they 'll
| make _less_ money and that 's absolutely fine.
| codinger wrote:
| Nah, the video game industry has micro-transactions down to
| a science.
| arcticbull wrote:
| I guess it depends on your definition of micro, I meant
| sub-$1.
| kevinob11 wrote:
| While I agree that killing advertising is effectively
| impossible I'm not sure I agree that the problem is that
| people aren't willing to pay for things.
|
| I think advertising dollars paying for services that users
| use is a convenient excuse that companies use to justify
| it, but it isn't an imperative for why it should exist.
|
| If you can't get people to pay for your service when they
| know the real price maybe your service shouldn't exist, or
| shouldn't exist at the scale it does now.
|
| That being said your main point that the industry grew
| organically based on human behavior certainly seems true.
| Banning advertising (like banning lobbying or corporate
| contributions to elected officials) is an impossible game
| of whack-a-mole. It can't be defined tightly enough to be
| outright banned (are you going to ban telling people you
| sell something they might like?) and the value derived from
| it is large enough that people will get creative when you
| ban the outcomes.
|
| That being said I do think the most egregious versions
| should be regulated. Ads to kids, deceptive mail or email
| ads that look like invoices or bills, ads that are
| obviously lying about features or benefits, but enforcement
| is incredibly difficult. I'm not especially optimistic.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| You can effectively kill it or curtail its noxious
| effects by banning common negative externalities of it.
|
| The GDPR, though having a massive enforcement problem,
| disallows targeted ads and all the privacy violations
| typically associated with them.
|
| You could make websites liable for the ads they display,
| automatically killing the "bottom of the barrel" of
| advertising such as chumboxes (Outbrain/Taboola/etc) and
| similar low-quality trash because the cost to review &
| audit these ads would outweigh any potential profits.
|
| You could revoke Section 230 protection for social media
| companies that manipulate the reach of content to
| increase engagement (which is why every social platform
| switched from a chronological feed to an algorithmic one)
| as to discourage the practice and prevent them from
| profiting off intentionally pushing harmful or even
| illegal content to increase engagement.
| irrational wrote:
| 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.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > But what happens when nobody sees the ads anymore? I
| run enough ad blockers that I never see ads on the
| Internet.
|
| Hopefully their return on investment will approach zero
| and they will stop putting ads on everything.
| prepend wrote:
| > 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.
| ruined wrote:
| people keep saying things like this but really it's a
| question of what's available
|
| music piracy is basically over thanks to spotify, apple
| music, youtube, bandcamp, etc
|
| hardly anyone i know torrents movies anymore due to
| netflix, hbo, hulu
|
| everyone has a phone plan instead of hopping around on free
| wifi constantly
|
| people pay for lyft/uber instead of just skipping fare on
| the train
|
| there exist social networks and communities that are
| effectively fee-supported. somethingawful and metafilter
| are some siloed examples, but there's the fediverse and
| stuff like mastodon where essentially people either join a
| specific community/clique that's funded by members or host
| their own instance.
|
| i'm convinced what keeps most people on the main
| advertiser-controlled networks is they are run by huge
| corporations with service monopolies and network effect.
| remember, whatsapp got big on a dollar per year
| subscription
| Manuel_D wrote:
| Devil's advocate: Advertising allows people to invest large
| amounts of money into products that don't charge end users.
| It allows largely equitable access to hugely powerful and
| complex information systems like Google search at no direct
| monetary cost to users.
|
| Most people put the value of Google search on the order of
| thousands of dollars per year [1]. Imagine Google was a paid
| service: think of the academic disparity between the children
| of wealthy students who had access to Google and poorer
| students who do not.
|
| 1. https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2018/04/25/how-
| much...
| peterburkimsher wrote:
| Compromise suggestion: product placement?
|
| Mix the ads inside the content so that the ad delivery
| mechanisms don't get in the way.
| [deleted]
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Google? You mean the billion dollar company that subverts
| web standards and gets away with it due to their browser
| monopoly? The one that nearly kills websites the second
| some advertiser becomes "concerned" over some content? The
| one that demonetizes actual creators for arbitrary reasons?
|
| They are very much part of the problem. Google search? It's
| bad and gets worse every day _because of advertising_ --
| Google has stopped trying to fight SEO spammers.
| zo1 wrote:
| Advertising is to your eyeballs like spam is to your inbox.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| 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?
| asxd wrote:
| I'm always kind of reminded of Louis C.K's old bit about how
| humans learned to literally _fly_ , and it turns out the whole
| experience sucks.
| atombender wrote:
| Isn't the whole point of that bit that we've become spoiled
| and indifferent, to the point where we no longer appreciate
| how amazing and futuristic our world has become?
| asxd wrote:
| I think you're right, but it's hard to argue that flying is
| both an amazing human achievement and is also just the
| worst.
|
| Edit: Wow, re-listening to the bit, my memory definitely
| failed me. Basically a rant on how we should be grateful
| that airline companies are even able to get a plane in the
| air. I think we can do better, personally.
| seanp2k2 wrote:
| 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...
| smsm42 wrote:
| 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 the car
| dealer would be the only one who had access to your car mileage
| or maintenance records, and would only tell you any information
| about it after you listened to the sales pitch. People would be
| grabbing torches and pitchforks if that happened. But for other
| businesses the same behavior is seen as OK.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >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.
| technothrasher wrote:
| I wish I thought you were joking. With subscription
| services now needed to remotely start your car, we're
| almost there.
| bsenftner wrote:
| Shhhh... seriously; GM and others from the car industry
| might get the idea and actually implement such a travesty.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| 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.
| dheera wrote:
| 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.
| jlmorton wrote:
| 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.
| dheera wrote:
| It isn't bizarre; screen scraping and re-presenting
| information to the user in a way that is convenient for
| them is absolutely essential to many assistive
| technologies.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| We should just make it legal, but this seems like a
| convenient "backdoor" way to do it - either the company
| site is fully screen-reader enabled 100% or scraping is
| allowed of any kind.
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