[HN Gopher] Airline Wizz Air is charging PS10 "System Surcharge"...
___________________________________________________________________
Airline Wizz Air is charging PS10 "System Surcharge" when using ad
blocker (2020)
Author : madjam002
Score : 167 points
Date : 2022-08-28 21:08 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (thepointsguy.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (thepointsguy.co.uk)
| smcl wrote:
| Wizz Air are on the rocks and should be avoided unless you
| _really_ like to gamble. There have been a few flights cancelled
| at _very_ last minute - one group I know were halfway through the
| ~10 of them checking in when they learned their flight was
| cancelled (on their way to a wedding). There was also a famous
| case this summer of a flight being cancelled after everyone had
| already boarded and the plane was on the runway.
|
| Don't bother, even if your ticket is 50 EUR cheaper it's not
| worth the risk.
| harvey9 wrote:
| Airline says it's a 'robot' fee for automated bookings made on
| the site but that errors mean it sometimes gets applied to human
| customers.
| dspillett wrote:
| Actually seems plausible: detecting a bot through differences
| in interaction, and the and blocker causing a false positive.
|
| Though a bad idea: I can think of no way an ad blocker could
| trip it that would not mean it could sometimes trip without one
| due to transient network errors, so it isn't likely to be
| terribly good at its main job of being a bot detector.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Not long before this applies to the flight itself.
|
| "Upgrade your ticket now to experience ads customization on your
| flight, including features such as seatback video dimming and
| optional opt-out of feedback surveys!"
| geoffeg wrote:
| "Upgrade your cabin pressurization now! If more than half the
| flight pays to upgrade the pilots will lower the cabin altitude
| from 15,000ft to 8,000ft!"
| klabb3 wrote:
| 15000ft is fine by me, why should I have to pay for other
| passengers pressurization? I thought this was America. I
| usually hyperventilate the entire flight to get my money's
| worth of O2.
| omginternets wrote:
| In the US, they've started playing advertisements at gas pumps.
| To make matters worse they turn the volume _way_ up.
|
| I have never in my life been so tempted to perform an act of
| vandalism. Something about this kind of invasion of personal
| and mental space is absolutely infuriating. I can't even
| daydream anymore -- even that is up for grabs by advertisers.
| ajvpot wrote:
| Pro tip: Usually one of the buttons on the side of the screen
| will mute the video even if the UI element isn't displayed.
| macintux wrote:
| I've been to a gas station where they have loudspeakers on
| the building itself and they pepper their customers and
| everyone else in a few hundred foot radius with noise.
|
| Thankfully it's been long enough I don't remember the
| contents but I think it was for food and drinks inside.
| thedailymail wrote:
| After that there will be surcharges for wearing an eyemask or
| noise-cancelling headphones, to recoup the airline's lost
| revenues from passengers' less than total engagement with in-
| flight ads.
| acka wrote:
| Black Mirror material indeed.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| _"Please drink a verification can"_
| madjam002 wrote:
| Just tried this myself, sure enough as you scroll down to the
| card payment section on the final page of the checkout flow
| (after all the optional upsells, seat selection etc), the price
| increases by PS10 x per passenger thanks to a "System surcharge"
| that is added. You wouldn't notice the charge being added unless
| you explicitly looked out for it, as it only appears when you
| start scrolling the page down to the card details form.
|
| Disabling ad block results in the charge not being applied.
|
| What's even more baffling is I had to complete a reCAPTCHA half
| way through the checkout flow, so them saying it's to do with bot
| detection is a stretch.
|
| Edited as I forgot to mention the captcha code during checkout
| flow.
| ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote:
| All sorts of price discrimination in the travel industry. Expedia
| has been advertising lower prices in their app, but at least
| they're upfront about it? I dunno, but it's annoying because you
| know it means "we can sell the additional data we gather if you
| have our app installed".
| can16358p wrote:
| Plausible deniability at its finest. While it could really be a
| robot filter indeed, the airline seems to be okay with charging
| customers if they can't show ads to them.
|
| Shady, but also kind of fair TBH.
| bwblabs wrote:
| Note the Wizz Air anti-bot statement
| (https://skift.com/2020/08/31/wizz-airs-odd-fee-for-
| buying-a-...). The "System Surcharge Fee - Applicable to bookings
| made by automated systems" of EUR 10 is listed on the Wizz Air
| website as service fee https://wizzair.com/en-gb/information-and-
| services/prices-di....
|
| I just opened https://wizzair.com/ with a default uMatrix config
| (only loading first party *.wizzair.com resources) and it
| complains straight away:
|
| _Are you human?
|
| An unusual activity was detected from your web browsing activity,
| which may also be done by a robot or "bot". For this reason it
| needs to be verified that you are human. Bots are not allowed to
| use our website/mobile app in order to protect your privacy and
| provide a reliable user experience.
|
| Some activities may look like they are done by a bot, such as
| running multiple sessions of the WIZZ website, or performing more
| than one search in a web browser.
|
| What if I am not a bot? Read on for a solution.
|
| We take many factors into consideration to make sure real
| website/mobile app users are properly distinguished from bots. We
| recommend the following:
|
| * Use the latest version of the supported web browsers (Chrome,
| Firefox);
|
| * Don't use your browser in incognito or compatibility mode;
|
| * Don't use ad blockers as they may conflict with our website's
| protection;
|
| * Don't use anonymizer proxies with botnets to hide your
| identity;
|
| * Try to book from another device and/or internet connection;
|
| * Use our mobile apps on iOS or Android
|
| Why can bots be harmful?
|
| * Some third parties such as online travel agencies use bots. If
| you book your WIZZ ticket through their websites, we may not be
| able to contact you about possible flight disruptions or any
| relevant changes, and they may also apply additional fees on the
| top of the ticket price;
|
| * Bots can overload our servers, slowing them down for our real
| customers.
|
| If you are using a bot, please note that:
|
| * By using automation tools on our website or mobile application,
| you are violating their terms of use.
|
| * As per these terms, we have the right to detect and block your
| activity and cancel any booking you make via these channels.
|
| * To provide the best service to our customers, bots can still
| access the Flight-Search capabilities, but we reserve the right
| to discontinue or block bot users even from Flight-Search,
| especially if over-use is detected;
|
| * If you would like to show our flights in your inventory, please
| contact us beforehand and make sure users are redirected to
| wizzair.com when they are ready to make their booking. You can
| also use a deep link to the selected flight._
| sys_64738 wrote:
| Do they actually show ads on their webpage when booking flights?
| I didn't see any conclusion to that.
| userbinator wrote:
| The first thing that came to mind when reading the title is "how
| do they detect? how can we crack it?" Much like anti-anti-
| debugging is a thing, perhaps adblockers also need to have anti-
| anti-adblock features.
|
| ...but things like this are why "remote attestation" and its ilk
| should be our biggest concern, because they can use such
| technologies to deny or distinguish anyone not using the --- no
| doubt already narrow and increasingly narrowing --- "supported"
| or "compliant" hardware and software.
| c7DJTLrn wrote:
| Soon they'll be charging extra for the flight to be on time. Both
| my recent inbound and outbound flights were delayed
| extensively...
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| My flight wasn't delayed, instead they announced as we were
| taking off that they needed to fly a detour and stop there for
| 40 minutes to refill the plane because they apparently couldn't
| calculate how much fuel they needed.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Zero chance that was an inability to calculate. Far more
| likely that it was economically driven somehow.
| harvey9 wrote:
| In a sense they do: compensation for delays is enforced by law
| in Europe.
| Aachen wrote:
| Yeah I tried that. People at the counter laughed "you can't
| do this here" (we were all right there and delayed by the
| same amount, why not just hand us the cash? Wire it to the
| accounts from which we paid the ticket? Sign us up
| automatically and send us the forms?). Okay, I said, where
| _can_ I do this then? "On our website probably." Okay I open
| the website, after navigating a horrible attempt at a mobile
| site for fifteen minutes I found the form and filled it out.
| Never heard from them again. Guess I should take them to
| court now?
|
| Railways (NL, DE) pull the same sort of crap. In NL there is
| a centralized billing system, they know exactly what path you
| took and when, so also that you were in the delay. Credit it
| to your transport card automatically? Nah. You need to fill
| out paperwork and then get a few euros for missing half of
| your evening. Germany is even better: whenever there's
| delays, you see long queues at the service center because
| (according to my colleague with whom I was there) you need to
| get something stamped IRL as proof that you were really there
| during the delay. And the amount you get back is still
| peanuts.
|
| Incentives like these to be on time don't work. I can't
| imagine more than a handful of people per trainload/planeload
| go through the hassle. At least for planes iirc it was a
| reasonable amount, at least for short delays where you don't
| have to book an entire holiday around. If you'd get it
| without a legal battle.
| YetAnotherNick wrote:
| Do they compensate the passenger?
| iso1210 wrote:
| In Europe you have EU261, which if the flight is
| significantly delayed (hours rather than minutes) means you
| get several hundered euros in compensation. The exact delay
| and amount depends on the length of the flight.
| gpderetta wrote:
| Mind, standard operating procedure is for most if not all
| airlines to deny the compensation because of
| "unforeseeable circumstances".
|
| Strike action because they don't pay their employees?
| Unforeseeable. The plane is broken? Unforeseeable. The
| airport cancelled the flight like it has been doing for
| the last 6 months? Unforeseeable.
|
| Then you have to appeal to the regulator or small claims
| and most people just give up.
|
| Sometimes they don't even refund your ticket after a
| cancellation and if you dare to chargeback they will
| prevent you from flying ever again.
|
| Consumer rights are great, but often is hard to enforce
| them.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| My friend got this money from Aer Lingus for a flight
| that was delayed until the next day because of weather.
| They could have argued it was unforeseeable but they
| didn't. They just paid up. It doesn't always work this
| way.
|
| The money was more than the flight was worth but the
| whole ordeal was terrible, literally every hotel in
| Dublin was booked out on every website (this wasn't the
| _only_ flight cancelled, every one of them was) and she
| had to stay in this horrible dirty hostel. So it was
| kinda nice to get that money.
| eertami wrote:
| I've had plenty of success using the EU regulators to
| enforce 261/2004 compensation requests if an airline is
| not following the rules.
|
| It can take a while for the regulator to get to your
| case, but it is only a 10-15 minute investment to find
| the relevant authority and to email to them with your
| information/circumstances. Then 2-4 months later the
| airline follows up to arrange payment. With budget
| flights the compensation can end up paying for multiple
| future flights.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| You're eligible for compensation in those cases - claim for it.
| cantSpellSober wrote:
| > _due to bugs in the AdBlockers, they can make the browser act
| unexpectedly, and flagged by our security tools as suspicious_
|
| I sorta buy this -- when browsing in Brave w/uBlock, Captchas
| appear and fail more often than when browsing without a condom
| on. I don't think it's a "bug" it's just harder to track you, and
| it throws off the spam catchers.
| aendruk wrote:
| Misleading title; more accurate would be "Surcharge intended for
| automated scrapers is accidentally applied to customers who use
| ad blockers"
|
| Still stupid, but a different kind.
| baybal2 wrote:
| adnauseum wrote:
| What would happen if I browsed using Lynx?
| userbinator wrote:
| Most likely you wouldn't even be able to buy a ticket. Appsites
| like these are entirely dependent upon JS for their
| functionality.
|
| On the other hand, I find it ironic that a low-cost airline
| would use such a complex site; if they are so miserly and
| minimal with their services that every little bit costs extra,
| a boring old HTML form seems like the most suited to them.
| Tao3300 wrote:
| I was going to give them the benefit of the doubt since it was
| anecdotal, but when he got to the "bugs in ad-blockers"
| explanation, the bullshit was spread a bit to thick for someone
| innocent.
|
| This is ableist discrimination and it's offensive. I require an
| ad-blocker to make the web usable with ADHD-PI.
| titaniczero wrote:
| Sounds credible to me. Some adblockers and lists block bot
| detection scripts on purpose, in some cases it could lead the
| system to flag you as a bot.
|
| What they should do in these cases is to fallback to a captcha
| or something like that.
| madjam002 wrote:
| What's interesting is when I booked the tickets, half way
| through the purchase journey I got a popup saying "Are you
| human?" with a reCAPTCHA to verify that I was human. They
| still tried to charge me PS10 at the end for a "System
| Surcharge".
| froggertoaster wrote:
| "Abelist discrimination" is perhaps the biggest HN stretch I've
| seen this week.
| [deleted]
| punkspider wrote:
| Almost every time I refresh the price changes a little. Is this
| normal? Video: https://i.imgur.com/C33FXlc.mp4
| p1necone wrote:
| How does this even help?
|
| Surely for the people who visit the site and _do_ buy a ticket
| the revenue lost from them blocking ads would be basically
| insignificant compared to what they pay for their tickets. And
| obviously the people that visit the site while blocking ads and
| _don 't_ pay for a ticket won't be paying the surcharge.
|
| I guess ultimately it helps by just bringing in extra revenue via
| a sneaky hidden charge that most people won't realize is there.
| But it doesn't _really_ have anything to do with ad revenue.
| aendruk wrote:
| Presumably by impeding competitors who attempt to automatically
| price match.
|
| For those who didn't read the full article (I don't blame you;
| it's nearly illegible--font weight 86!?) the airline intended
| to price-discriminate against automated scrapers, not against
| people who don't view ads, but distinguishing between robots
| and humans is futile in practice.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Maybe adverts from a confirmed traveller going to a particular
| destination are valuable?
| [deleted]
| jacquesm wrote:
| Not as valuable as the typical EU fine for these kind of
| nasty tricks.
| MonkeyMalarky wrote:
| Shit, Ticket Master is missing out on some real innovation here!
| DanAtC wrote:
| AXS already stops working outright in the middle of buying
| tickets if Apple's Private Relay is enabled.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| It surprises me that they charge $10 to a suspected bot instead
| of blocking it.
| karamanolev wrote:
| Time for adblockers to add the whole Wizz domain to their lists
| then?
| littlestymaar wrote:
| > If you do book any Wizz Air flights and notice any unexplained
| extra charges in your booking summary, turn off ad-blocking
| software, which should remove the surcharge.
|
| Do not turn you ad-blocking software (that's what they want),
| instead warn your local consumer protection authority, and email
| a copy of your reporting to Wizz Air, I'm pretty sure the PS10
| fee is going to disappear as well, for you and luckily for
| everyone else.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Your local consumer protection authority won't have any idea
| what you're talking about - they aren't experts in these
| things.
| jacquesm wrote:
| They are going to hit them hard and they know very well what
| they are doing. I really don't know where you got that idea
| but EU consumer protection authorities have teeth and they
| bite when it suits them. This sort of stuff will not fly, and
| I'm pretty sure the various privacy authorities will also
| want to put in a word or two.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| That's be great... but I'm imagining even trying to explain
| 'ad blocker' to a typical civil servant.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The same people that cracked down on roaming charges will
| know what to do about an adblocker surcharge.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Every person understands a roaming charge, because all
| they experience them. 0.001% of people use an adblocker
| or even know what one is.
|
| This will always be a problem while government pays 10%
| of big-tech pay.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Your stats are off by many orders of magnitude.
|
| https://earthweb.com/how-many-people-use-ad-blockers/
| vntok wrote:
| The stats you linked includes people who use "some form
| of ad blocker" and indicates "If you use Google Chrome,
| you probably already know that it has a built-in ad
| blocker that has a default setting to block ads across
| websites" and "Firefox has an ad blocking feature as does
| Safari".
|
| So if they count built-in adblocking features as
| abblockers, of course the resulting figure is very high,
| as it's basically equal to the % of internet users who
| installed Chrome or Safari. This does not mean that
| regular folks use and understand adblockers, just that
| they use the two most popular browsers in the world.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Their definition of 'adblocker' isn't what anyone else
| means, is it? Come one.
| airstrike wrote:
| As a general concept, I'm not opposed to having to pay for a
| service instead of seeing ads. Or even better, to be able to
| choose whether I want a free service with ads or a paid service
| with no ads.
|
| But if I'm already paying for the service (in this case, the
| airline ticket) why are you trying to show me ads? This makes
| absolutely zero sense
| dalbasal wrote:
| The general concept is, IMO, deceiving.
|
| Making ads optional is often suggested, sometimes tried, and
| there aren't many success stories. Most successful combinations
| of ad/payment commercial strategies aren't customer choice
| scenarios.
|
| Most subscription papers made more on ads than subscriptions,
| but subscribership made ads sell at a premium. The stable
| revenue is nice too. Ryanair clones use advertising as within
| their get-an-extra-penny ethos. Buses and such do the same.
|
| A lot of people seem to like the theory of paid opt-out... but
| that doesn't seem to be a thing.
| bruckie wrote:
| YouTube premium seems to be a counterexample. I wonder why
| it's managed to stick around (and be pushed so hard) when
| other pay-for-no-ads attempts have failed (either before or
| after they launched).
| macintux wrote:
| Sort of. Arguably the sponsored ads in many videos argues
| against it being a true counterexample.
| MOARDONGZPLZ wrote:
| I still got ads with Premium YouTube so ended up canceling.
| What's the point of paying for no ads when I get ads
| anyways?
| Shank wrote:
| Maybe you're conflating in-video sponsorships with ads?
| If you're signed into YouTube Premium the system won't
| serve you ads in that browser/app, but obviously a video
| creator can still read a sponsorship message.
| eslaught wrote:
| Paramount+ (formerly CBS All Access)? As far as I know it
| still offers two subscription modes, ad and ad-free, and
| subscriber stats on Wikipedia seem to be trending in a
| positive direction.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramount%2B
|
| But I think the real issue is this: aside from services that
| use ads as an explicit differentiator, there is really no
| reason for a service that charges customers not to also add
| ads. It's just extra revenue. The only reason I could see for
| services not wanting to do this is when they want to
| specifically cultivate a "premium" feel. Cable in the US
| was/is a classic example: people paid inordinate feels for
| access, and then _also_ put up with ads on top of it all. And
| for a large segment of the population, cable was so
| ubiquitous as to be unthinkable not to subscribe to it.
| recursive wrote:
| > there is really no reason
|
| Ads are annoying, and drive down usage?
| criddell wrote:
| Are you opposed to having ads plastered on the insides of
| public transit vehicles?
| krm01 wrote:
| Perhaps the ads help make it cheaper
| paradaux wrote:
| There is no universe where Wizz is earning PS10 per visitor
| booking a ticket through their website. Ads are dollars or
| parts of a dollar per thousand clicks
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| It identifies passengers that are not price sensitive.
| Price sensitive customers are subsidized in all airlines by
| overcharging customers that are not price sensitive (e.g.
| business class).
| jacquesm wrote:
| Anybody flying Wizz Air is price sensitive.
| jltsiren wrote:
| On some routes, there are no alternatives to low-cost
| airlines if you want a direct flight. For example, when I
| flew from Prague to Milan a couple of months ago, the
| options were basically Wizz Air and Ryanair.
| tomrod wrote:
| Someone at Wizz skipped the statistics lesson on
| variance. There is no way an adblocker accurately
| identifies price sensitivity outside of qualitative
| handwaving.
| krisoft wrote:
| > There is no way an adblocker accurately identifies
| price sensitivity outside of qualitative handwaving.
|
| Perhaps they are banking on this information becoming
| public knowledge, so it can become a signal? :)
| [deleted]
| gruez wrote:
| Why not? It seems at least somewhat plausible that people
| who know about ad blockers are technically savvy and
| technically savvy people do better in the job market,
| therefore higher income and lower price sensitivity.
| tomrod wrote:
| Correct. Your comment is qualitative handwaving, an
| armchair speculation that sounds plausible. Is that
| enough justification to pend off eventual discrimination
| lawsuits? I personally doubt it.
|
| Very few companies have the analytics maturity to use A/B
| testing in production to prove your hand-waving assertion
| without the effect failing sensitivity checks. And by
| very few, I point to the ones that hire economists and
| eocnonetricians en masse as having an inkling and trying
| to work this out in the ad tech space.
| goldcd wrote:
| Maybe not a loss from adverts as you book - but knowing
| when somebody is going to arrive in a city is worth an f'in
| fortune to hotels looking to shift unsold rooms.
| jpalomaki wrote:
| Might be valuable if you can monetize the information that
| this person is looking to travel to certain location at
| certain time.
|
| To my knowledge, there's different systems that are
| collecting this kind of information and then driving highly
| targeted marketing based on that.
| dalbasal wrote:
| First, perhaps not. In that case, the budget airline
| mindset kicks in: if some people are willing to pay for
| something, charge differentially.
|
| However, I wouldn't be so sure that PS10 per _user_ isn 't
| the actual value of the ad impressions _and data_. Users
| who would pay to opt out of ads aren 't a random sample.
| They're adblock using airline ticket buyers who paid for
| some sort of premium experience. Could easily be a premium
| segment.
|
| Advertising is valuable, and that value isn't evenly
| distributed at all.
| bhedgeoser wrote:
| Google is the only thing losing a lot of money because of
| adblockers. They told them to do it?
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| Yes, also, all airlines have ads visible to you. The name on
| of the airline is a big billboard on every plane. It's not
| actually necessary. I'm honestly surprised airlines don't put
| more ads on their planes, but perhaps there is some
| regulation preventing that.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| More ads?
|
| "We ask that you pay attention to the security presentation
| - which conveniently is now bookended by ads that of course
| cannot be skipped and since audio comes out of the plane's
| PA, everybody has to put up with".
| rad_gruchalski wrote:
| The sefaty presentation will continue after an add.
| teeray wrote:
| Or, it could be the same price, but an airline MBA wants to
| squeeze out some ad impressions from you along with your
| full-price ticket.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| it doesn't make sense anyway.
|
| Me blocking ads should make flights less cheap for everybody,
| not more expensive only for me.
|
| Ads are not part of the deal when I am buying flight tickets.
|
| Unless they can prove me blocking ads costed them 10 pounds
| and I have accepted those terms.
| comprev wrote:
| When flying with Ryanair you're bombarded with ads - from
| car hire, to package holidays in hotels, to meal bundles
| and even scratch cards (!!)
|
| All the products/services are Ryanair branded mind but it's
| still quite full-on.
| peoplefromibiza wrote:
| > you're bombarded with ads
|
| what you call ads it's actually called upselling.
|
| I can buy none of those items and the price of the ticket
| will not increase.
|
| I do not travel Ryanair because I cannot skip the in
| cabin ads.
|
| But even if I did use their services, wearing noise
| canceling headphones would not cost me more.
| acka wrote:
| > what you call ads it's actually called upselling.
|
| Are you sure you don't mean cross selling? IIUC upselling
| means trying to sell a customer a more expensive version
| of their chosen product, while cross selling means trying
| to sell extra products which combine well with the
| customer's chosen product.
| inferiorhuman wrote:
| You get all that shit with United (and I suspect other
| American based carriers) too. It's tacky but that's
| modern air travel for you.
| gaze wrote:
| This is never how it works out. The ticket price is set to
| what people will pay for it. Everything else -- ads and all,
| are just additional profit.
| mym1990 wrote:
| This is really really reductive. There is a range of prices
| that people will pay, and the final ticket price is
| probably a a study of how long it would take to pay off a
| project with a range of demand levels. As a plus,
| advertising is more effective with more traffic, so lower
| prices to get more demand and offsetting that with ads
| could be worthwhile.
|
| Now tbh, I have no idea if this is how it works. Just my
| own reasoning about things.
| dehrmann wrote:
| Isn't this what we've been asking for? They either make $10
| selling you info to marketers or you pay extra? And this is an
| ultra low-cost carrier. It's almost expected.
| josephcsible wrote:
| No, we've been asking for a _choice_ between seeing ads _or_
| paying. This is _both_ seeing ads _and_ paying. It 'd only be
| what we asked for if people who didn't use adblockers got their
| plane tickets for free.
| klabb3 wrote:
| Adblockers are also used to prevent tracking. You can be
| opposed to tracking without being opposed to ads and vice
| versa.
| jacquesm wrote:
| No, it is entirely unexpected and labeled in a misleading way.
| If they had opened with 'we are going to charge you $10 extra
| if you don't disable your adblocker' that would be one thing
| (that would likely piss off a lot of people but at least it
| would be above board).
| wumpus wrote:
| The ad revenue is worth pennies, and the "choice" of using an
| adblocker vs paying 10 pounds extra is pretty invisible.
|
| Neither of these are what anyone asked for.
| jonnycomputer wrote:
| How about this. You land on the site, and there is a popup that
| says, "If you allow us to show you ads while you're shopping,
| we'll give you l10 off the ticket price!"
| [deleted]
| ninefathom wrote:
| When I got down to Wizz Air's statement about "bugs in
| adblockers" making browsers "act unexpectedly" thereby triggering
| the robot detection code, I was reminded of the robot detection
| functionality in a very common enterprise WAF middle-box that
| injects background JavaScript on the page to detect bots. The
| code supposedly produced no user-visible change but would
| participate in some SOAP challenge/response fluff.
|
| We ended up never deploying it because the false positive rate
| was absurdly high- on the order of 38% or so- with no tuning
| options available (short of falling back to a captcha). Having
| said that, I'd expect that this is a very common practice. I also
| suspect that blaming the ad blockers for lazy middle-box usage
| (if indeed that's what this particular case proves to be) is
| _not_ going to age well.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's pretty close to an admission of incompetence.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| squeaky-clean wrote:
| I used to work for an airfare marketing company. We would get
| our 3rd party scripts onto an airlines booking engine to be
| able to run our own analytics and gather data for ads. We'd
| mainly collect things like prices, number of available seats,
| etc, because it turns out airlines can't really give you those
| answers through an API without it costing too much, so we
| piggybacked on real customer searches.
|
| Almost no one in the office ran adblockers, which was weird to
| me. When our analytics traffic dropped by like 50% one day, I
| was the only one to notice that our domain made it onto
| EasyList.
|
| I created a GH issue about it, had a productive chat with a
| maintainer about what data we collected, and which data they
| thought was PII. If we wanted our domain unblocked we could
| remove the PII data from the requests, or create a secondary
| domain that only received the non-PII data.
|
| We were gathering data that was not legally considered PII by
| something like GDPR, but I understand why an adblocker would be
| even more strict than the legal minimums. I brought this up
| with the executives and instead they tried to threaten the
| maintainers of the block list and tried to educate them on how
| "technically this isn't personally identifiable data according
| to this legal spec".
|
| The maintainers stopped responding (rightfully so) and our data
| collection was forever halved.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| You might say the WAF was Imperva-ious.
|
| I remember an instance where Lowe's website was broken on the
| corporate network. Our proxy re-arranged the order of HTTP
| content headers from the site, and Akamai took it as malicious
| behavior.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| Lowes website has been 100% broken for me ever since I
| enabled Resist Fingerprinting in Firefox.
|
| I can load exactly one page, but on any navigation or refresh
| I get:
|
| =====
|
| Access Denied You don't have permission to access
| "http://www.lowes.com/" on this server. Reference
| #18.cc69dc17.1661724957.fe4ef4
|
| ====
|
| Result, unless I use the profile with fingerprinting enabled,
| I just have to buy elsewhere.
|
| Drupal.org triggers "prove you're not a robot" every few page
| navigations with Resist Fingerprinting enabled. Walmart.com
| too.
|
| Fedex package tracking errors (seemingly due to the API
| server refusing the connection) if resist fingerprinting is
| enabled. Amusingly if you use the website help bot and say
| "track XXXXX" that _does_ work to get some basic information.
| gruez wrote:
| I have RFP enabled and it works fine for me. I did get the
| "Access Denied" error you mentioned on my first try, but
| after switching VPN servers it worked fine.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| On Lowes.com? Retest in a clean profile. Seems that once
| they trust you you are ok for a while, at least from a
| friend's test, who was able to reproduce in a clean
| profile. But maybe it is IP linked and takes a little bit
| to accumulate. Did you just enable
| privacy.resistFingerprinting recently?
|
| Also. Doublecheck that it is enabled. Also, I'm using
| Nightly firefox. It may be the resist fingerprinting is
| more robust there.
|
| BTW, this isn't using a VPN or anything that might seem
| suspicious. Just my bog standard US broadband.
| mort96 wrote:
| For the last one, make sure it's not on your end. I've seen
| order tracking HTTP requests be blocked by uBlock Origin
| simply because the URL contains `/tracking` or something.
| capitainenemo wrote:
| This is in a profile with no addons, and only Resist
| Fingerprinting enabled. Also had it confirmed by someone
| else. Should be fairly easy to reproduce. Just create a
| clean profile and access tracking with Resist
| Fingerprinting enabled in about:config
|
| Also the symptoms are identical to Lowes.com:
| https://api.fedex.com/track/v2/shipments
|
| =======
|
| Access Denied You don't have permission to access
| "http://api.fedex.com/track/v2/shipments" on this server.
| Reference #18.946bdc17.1661726294.3996e59c
|
| ======
| ninefathom wrote:
| Not quite, but I've used that one before as well. I suspect
| many of them offer similar(ly naive) functionality.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Is this even legal?
|
| I know the EU has an anti-price discrimination policy based on
| location, so that probably does not apply, but I don't think they
| thought anybody would be crazy enough to do this.
|
| Calling it a 'System Surcharge' seems highly misleading and one
| of the things the EU tends to come down on like a ton of bricks
| is misleading line items in service charges. If they had called
| it an 'adblock surcharge' they might get away with it but this
| seems entirely on purpose.
| gpderetta wrote:
| Probably not. Additional mandatory charges on top of the
| advertised price are not legal. Airlines get fined periodically
| for these reasons, but they keep on doing it anyway.
| Bilal_io wrote:
| Perhaps they're not being fined enough.
| mort96 wrote:
| Probably. When the fine is less than the gain, it's not a
| fine, it's a cost of doing business.
| xattt wrote:
| "It was a system error brought on by unapproved use of our
| website, honest!"
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(page generated 2022-08-28 23:00 UTC)