Little Blue Lies

Discount airline JetBlue is fervently denying that it has provided confidential passenger information to the federal government in order to aid in the development of CAPPS II passenger profiling software. (CAPPS stands for for Computerized Airline Passenger Pre-Screening System.) An email sent out to concerened customers claimed:

No JetBlue customer information has been shared with the US Government with respect to testing the CAPPS II program currently under design.

Bill Scannell calls bullshit. Turns out that what this incredibly misleading statement means is that JetBlue gave data on 5 million passengers to a government contractor to test a prototype program that wasn't yet being referred to as CAPPS II. That is, the info wasn't used for the program "currently under design." Whatever their definition of "is" is, privacy conscious travellers may want to think twice about flying JetBlue.

Comments

[me]

You guys do what you want, of course, but for me? Screw privacy: They give me the DirecTV on my seat, they can have my info.

[Ray]

What kind of information does the airline have that any online or catalogue vendor that I frequent, not have?

I only fly about three or four times a year but I have yet to be forced to provide my Social#. Outside of that, home address, possibly a Visa # etc.

At least the obvious was already stated in the post; don’t like it, fly another airline.

[Dan]

They offer DirecTv? Neato.

[Anonymous]

Ray, JetBlue HAS a privacy policy for their customers that they wouldn’t give out the information. Then they violated the policy.

[Stmack]

Privacy policy and DirectTV or not their willingness to participate in the development of a system as inherently bad as as CRAPP II is reason enough to fly another arline.

[reality]

You think your information is private?

You probably wonder why you get so much junk mail and spam, too.

Fools.

[LauraN]

How to ruin a growing and popular airline in one easy lesson. PFFT! Morons! Well, perhaps that is how they were able to afford the DirecTV. One assumes they didn’t release the info because they wanted to play nice…

Of course, being the pessimistic bitch – if you are breathing and live in the US, the SOBs already know everything they may have acquired from the airline. Still, I detest their use of weasel words to deny involvement. Bring on the lawsuits!!