The carrier on Friday said it launched a media platform to serve travelers personalized advertisements on seat-back screens and in its app, among other platforms, as it seeks to leverage customer data.
This is why you bring tape and a few pieces of paper in your carry-on
All I can say…
Booooooo!
FUCK THAT
Phones play movies. If they make the seatback system annoying then people will just stop using it and download movies from Netflix or wherever
ability to reach engaged customers
Not sure that being stuck to a spot in a tube you can’t just escape (and easily live) from is the same as “engaged”.
not flying united anymore, thanks for the tip
I’ll scratch the screen with my keys if so
Hell world
It is on a Boeing 737 max 8…🤣 So, if you are crazy enough to enter a plane that falls out of the sky because of corrupt Boeing and FAA then you are also crazy enough to see personalized ads 🤣
Flying is still the safest mode of travel.
Generally speaking yes, but not with Boeing 737 max 8
Yeah. This. This is what will send me to live in a commune.
I launch baseball cap pulled down on my eyes
And now I will never fly United again. Time to move on
I bet soon more airlines will follow. Our cars are no different either. No much options left for traveling.
I will not travel then. I refuse to be violated.
I admire your conviction. But in that case we also have to consider how your right to move about freely is being affected. If you feel like you need to choose not to travel when you want or need to travel, how will you reconcile? Do you weigh and choose the lesser evil? Seems like you just end up violated one way or another. I don’t like it, not any of this.
But how can they access a passenger’s digital profile?
I would assume it’s mostly ads for tourist places or local attractions at your destination
But the article says the ads are personalized. I really suspect it goes deeper than just the destination
Oh please. It’s 2024, and you’re still wondering how a company knows who you are? The plane knows who is sitting on which seat, unless you change seats, and the airline has, at least: you email, your credit card, name, address, gender, age, nacionality, origin and destination. From there, they can ask a number of data brokers for more information like purchase habits, health, wheather you have children, your field of work, etc etc. Even if it’s one’s of those flights without assigned seats, there are cameras in the cabin. It would be pretty easy to face ID who is sitting where.
That’s what I wanted to know. Well total surveillance is slowly becoming a thing. Having multiple digital identities and using privacy-respecting services makes more and more sense every day
The problem is that you can’t fly anonymous. They will always know exactly who you are. But yeah, you can at least try to limit the information on you, but still.
I believe you can use your “official identity” only for stuff that requires identification (like border crossing, business and flights) and create another one for general internet usage and stuff like that. It’s much harder in countries that require ID to buy a SIM card though
I think the whole of Europe requires ID for SIM cards these days.
It makes sense why they want to do it but it’s really sad. I think you still can use the majority of privacy-respecting internet if you host your own email (so you don’t need a phone number to register it) but it basically reverts the internet to the 90s because you need knowledge to set up a server and it doesn’t let you use almost all of the popular messenger apps, making usage of the “official identity” mandatory to contact most of the people and therefore lose privacy when the situation gets worse
I wouldn’t mind the ID if providers were regulated properly and couldn’t harvest user data, but naturally that’s not the case 😢 even governments expect to be able to request customer data.
Slowly? It’s already here. Been here for some years even
Not really. Some stuff can still remain private and there are useful privacy-respecting services. I believe it can get much worse
I take small pleasure in the fact that any ads I see I have no intention of ever purchasing their shit. I would actively tell people to avoid it as well. We literally have ads shoved in our faces 24/7 and the amount I have after bills and shit is already earmarked so the ad companies can go shove a baseball bat up their ass.
Last time I had my phone plugged in to charge it, I noticed that it wasn’t on charge mode exclusively, but it was actually on File Share Mode.
Now I don’t know if the airplane was able to instigate that connection mode, or why my phone was on that mode, but it did concern me incredibly that they were able to browse the files on my phone, when I just wanted it to charge.
That’s why you should use “usb condom” when charing your phone from untrusted power source.
Well that is obvious. Btw many phones have file share mode as the default now. Make sure you change it. But how about other cases? I don’t really understand. Are digital profiles officially tied to the ID and plane tickets now?
Or do you have an UA credit card?
They know your name. That’s usually enough.
And your email, identity document, photo, payment method… lots of fun data points to boil it down to a demographic of one person.
Yes, let’s add things that make it mentally more claustrophobic, too.
A couple years ago I paid what I felt was quite a bit of money for good seats on a plane. Then they started playing ads on the screen in front of me during take off. There was no way to turn off the screen and it literally felt like this screen was being thrust my face that I had no co trol over. Airline is the worst way to travel and they are only going to get more predatory.
I highly doubt you actually couldn’t turn it off if it was during flight. Also you could just not look at the screen, same as with any other ads you see in your daily life constantly.
k
Post-it notes. One pack is enough for like a third of the plane.
I flew Icelandic air recently and they had A 4 minute long ad playing with no way to skip or mute that had to play before the entertainment system was available. It played a soon as you turned it on!
I had to unplug and look away for 4+ minutes
Which airline?
Air Canada
Ads themselves are an insult considering the cost of travel. But they’re insulting us all over the place on shit we pay for.
But personalized ads in view of strangers is full-on absurdly an insult to privacy. Get bent, I hope someone finds a way to display the guitar video and song for the whole plane.
I was just pumping gas the other day, and while I’m at it there’s this cellphone speaker music that starts really loudly, like the phone is at 400% audio.
Motherfucking screen started playing an ad I couldn’t skip. Soon theyre just going to loop audible ads everywhere we go, in public spaces.
Since then I’ve avoided this brand of gas station and affiliates, but I won’t be able to hide for long.
you can press one of the buttons, if it’s one of those with the eight buttons (4 on each side of the screen. for me it was the second button down from the top on the right side. i only had to press it once to mute, but i heard u might have to press up to 4 times
doesn’t always work unfortunately
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=7bXJ_obaiYQ
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Or worse, how about some horny singles in my area with moans for the whole plane to hear
As you traverse the continent, the same “single” appears looking for love in every town you fly over.
Edit: then you’re over Nevada and ads switch to “Welcome back! We missed you at Bobs Brothel and Budget Backrubs, swing on by for our returning members discount.”
Yeah that would suck. Also how much is that discount?
6.9%
Ni.ce
