Okay, I'm now taking this just about as far OT as I can go, apologies to FB members, these are the last comments I'll make on this matter on this board... But in my defense, it all started innocently.
Interestingly, in the USA United, American, and Delta all, have enjoined aggregating websites (e.g., awardwallet.com, amongst others, who allow for "one stop shopping" of mileage balances, status levels, etc. for airlines, hotels, rental car companies, credit cards, etc.) from scraping their systems for data, meaning that subscribers to those various sites could no longer rely on mileage updates through the use of such sites. One of the sites came up with a workaround for United (they had members create email accounts that are associated with the website, and then go to ual.com and change the email on file to the new site email, so once a month when UA sends out balance emails, the site will update member accounts).
American relented with awardwallet.com, and my understanding is that now they allow it, so they know that people are putting in their AA FF#s and PWs. And I suspect that they're okay with it, presumably after looking at the site's policies for storing data, encryption, etc. I can't prove it, though, as I really don't have a clue as to how any of those sites really work.
I would think that European carriers could just as easily stop third party sites from such activity if they wanted to, and the fact that they haven't stopped them leads me to suspect that they're okay with it. And the same would go for financial institutions that allow mint.com etc. to aggregate financial data. It
is within their power to curtail such use.
Interestingly, AF's FB is available on awardwallet.com, amongst other aggregating sites (I just looked, they list out who's supported), so either they're not aware of it, or they tacitly approve of it, T&C wording (which is often times there as a broad protection for the FFP) to the contrary or not. Lufthansa and BA and SQ and TG and QF (and the list is quite long...) are also "participants" in such sites. I'm not saying that's
good, I'm just saying what
is.
Okay, back to our regularly-scheduled programming...