JETBLUE: WHY THE FUSS?

The fear of fly­ing wasn’t some abstract, idle con­cern for Joshua Gruber. It was as tan­gi­ble as the pile of con­crete and steel and flesh and ash, smol­der­ing at Manhattan’s south­ern end on 9/​11, the day he was in the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
But fly­ing home to California for Christmas on JetBlue — his first cross-​​country trip after the tragedy — made the whole thing eas­ier to take. The staff seemed like human beings, not cor­po­rate automa­tons. The planes were brand-​​new. Best of all, as he flew, Gruber could watch the Food Network on his own pri­vate tele­vi­sion screen.
“You’d sit down, watch Food TV, and, before youd know it, youd be there,” Gruber said. “It made it eas­ier to fly after September 11 to have that dis­trac­tion.“
Although the air­line is known for its cheap fares, he added, “I’d pay more to fly JetBlue. I had, in fact. And I had encour­aged my friends to try it.“
All of which makes JetBlue’s deci­sion to hand its pas­sen­ger records over to a firm doing a gov­ern­ment terrorist-​​screening study even more mad­den­ing to Gruber.
“It made it sort of like I had been betrayed by a friend, rather than by a big com­pany,” he said.
Businesses sell, trade, and swap their cus­tomers’ data with each other all the time. That’s why every prod­uct reg­is­tra­tion card includes infor­ma­tion about income, age, occu­pa­tion. That’s why web-​​based com­pa­nies even privacy-​​savvy ones like TerraLycos (which owns Wired News) — “will some­times share per­son­ally iden­ti­fi­able infor­ma­tion with third-​​party com­pa­nies and orga­ni­za­tions.“
But the JetBlue pri­vacy deba­cle has unleashed unusual pas­sions in the pub­lic. Already, there’s a class action law­suit against the car­rier for its data han­dover. Already, Gruber has received more than a thou­sand e-​​mails from out­raged JetBlue cus­tomers. And already, the Department of Homeland secu­rity is begin­ning to con­duct an inter­nal inves­ti­ga­tion into how pas­sen­ger data is used.
Why the fuss? Passengers, pri­vacy advo­cates and air­line ana­lysts all sound a com­mon theme: fliers like Joshua Gruber devel­oped pow­er­ful ties to JetBlue, ties that were unusual in busi­ness and espe­cially rare the noto­ri­ously nasty air­line indus­try.
When the com­pany turned over its cus­tomers’ pri­vate records with­out their knowl­edge — in vio­la­tion of JetBlue’s own pri­vacy pol­icy — that sense of cor­po­rate love quickly exploded into rage.
My Wired News story has more.
THERE’S MORE: Defense Tech reader KH writes, about “an inter­est­ing popup ad I saw on the com​put​er​world​.com site. The text is: ‘We helped JetBlue Airways do some­thing unique with their data: treat cus­tomers like peo­ple. Unisys.’”
Ah, the irony…
AND MORE: Gen. Wesley Clark was on the board of one of the com­pa­nies involved in the JetBlue data mess, Glenn Reynolds notes.
AND MORE: The ACLU now has a web site where JetBlue pas­sen­gers can file a request to find out what the gov­ern­ment may be hold­ing on them.

September 27th, 2003 | Data Diving | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.