Moves by IATA and the airlines to screw individual passengers with specially tailored fares based on their personal data ought to be resisted, if not challenged under consumer or discrimination laws where such remedies are available.
This is not just about airfares. It is about reinstating personal privacy and security to our lives in a world where we give away too much about our incomes, our intimate relationships, our tastes in food, music, furniture, accessories, and even precisely where we live, where and when any children go to school, whether we have large or small dogs, the geometry of our gardens and even the layout of our homes.
In the wider community the willingness of people, including our children, to shares photos and videos of their intimate experiences, where they then get copied and broadcast online and forever, has exposed society to the dangers of massive invasions of privacy, including targeted criminal acts.
Some of these problems are alluded to in this story in the Fairfax Media this morning, if in somewhat anodyne terms.
The premise of the story, that the airlines are seeking to use personalized pricing to help retain the loyalty of customers by selling lower fares to them is not-of-the-real-world. They are using your personal data to work out what they can get away with.
Consider the contrary scenario. Customers belonging to a loyalty scheme are ‘owned’ in the minds of those who own or manage them. They are there to be mined, if not ploughed by what are in essence data based individually focused marketing schemes.
Those who do not appear to be ‘owned’ or aligned to a particular brand are by definition, there to be induced to buy based on the value proposition, which in its initial stages, is almost entirely driven by price, because they will almost certainly, be comparative shoppers.
In this contrarian scenario, customers with hidden or undeclared brand preferences will be the ones who get offered the cheapest fares. Call it the Rewards of Anonymity.
It is difficult to protect your family and yourself from intrusive internet age surveillance. But that isn’t reason for not trying. LinkedIn is dangerous for reporters because its system of referring you to others can also be gamed to reveal who you are linked to, compromising the anonymity of contacts. (The writer’s LinkedIn account is a fake, as is any Facebook page claiming to be me, and I don’t Instagram my meals, shower and shave time, or anything else related to how I or those dear to me live.)
Such circles of association can also be sources of cross referenced insights into a consumer’s circumstances or preferences or weaknesses.
So called voluntary online pop-up surveys may involve seriously unwise disclosures about how you live, where you live, what you earn, and where vulnerabilities in your personal space may be, not to mention who you bank with, what credit or charge cards you might use, or what your children are called.
There is no need to share these things with outsiders or businesses.
Be a man or woman of mystery. Make the airlines work hard for your money. Don’t serve yourself up on a plate. Your travel habits are no one else’s business. You know what you need, you go to the supposedly equal and transparent market place to buy what you need, and you have an implied right in consumer law to expect that the same offer is available equally to all buyers provided there is an unsold seat on the flight you want.
The two biggest security holes people face in Australia are the Electoral Rolls and driver licensing data bases, and they preceded the early 90s revolution facilitated by the first user friendly internet browsers. Both need urgent security upgrades to prevent location and data harvesting by criminals, stalkers and marketers.
But in the meantime, if personalized pricing is allowed to feed off social media and loyalty program data bases, your dinner parties may not be about how many millions you lost in the housing bubble of 2015, but about discovering who was the most or least ripped off by which airline flying on whatever route.
The post Time to unshare your personal info with airlines? appeared first on Plane Talking.
