United Airlines starts serving passengers personalized ads on seat-back screens
www.cnbc.com
United's Kinective Media is the latest example of how airlines have adopted new revenue streams such as cobranded cards.

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.

    • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
      351·
      7 months ago

      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.

      • GolfNovemberUniform
        12·
        7 months ago

        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

        • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
          13·
          7 months ago

          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.

          • GolfNovemberUniform
            6·
            7 months ago

            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

              • GolfNovemberUniform
                3·
                7 months ago

                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

                • jol@discuss.tchncs.de
                  4·
                  7 months ago

                  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.

          • GolfNovemberUniform
            2·
            7 months ago

            Not really. Some stuff can still remain private and there are useful privacy-respecting services. I believe it can get much worse

      • Holyginz@lemmy.world
        5·
        7 months ago

        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.

    • makingStuffForFun
      20·
      7 months ago

      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.

      • GolfNovemberUniform
        9·
        7 months ago

        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?

          • GolfNovemberUniform
            1·
            7 months ago

            Oh so they just use the data from the credit card like age and gender? It’s still bad but not that much of a problem as if they had access to all Google, Apple, Meta and other kinds of analytics and behavior data. Though I heard some banks do buy that data so I wouldn’t be surprised if they gave it to the airline. Well I know the era of total surveillance is coming. The EU may fight it but the US doesn’t seem to have any desire to do so. That’s unfortunate but only a big amount of active people can change it. Also what is an UA card?

      • rmuk@feddit.ukEnglish
        18·
        7 months ago

        And your email, identity document, photo, payment method… lots of fun data points to boil it down to a demographic of one person.

    • windtorn@beehaw.org
      3·
      7 months ago

      I would assume it’s mostly ads for tourist places or local attractions at your destination

      • GolfNovemberUniform
        5·
        7 months ago

        But the article says the ads are personalized. I really suspect it goes deeper than just the destination