onthego15

What's the big deal. I downloaded the toolbar, did few searches and then uninstalled it the same day.

Andy Big Bear

Well the problem with these toolbar programs (and there is a lot of them) is that you can't really be sure when the program is removed that its completely removed. What usually happens is that the company that deploys it pays the company distributing it to get on the desktop. There's been spyware, adware, and malware distributed in these programs. Often the people who agree to help distribute this software have no idea what's in it and since a significant amount of software work has been outsourced to foreign shores, sometimes those programmers take a little extra money to insert backdoors in the software. Sometimes software like this simply has the purpose to redistribute other software, that is part of botnets and such.

likry2000

United, American, US Airways and Delta are all discontinuing their shopping assistant toolbars as of today.

dioxide45

I wonder if the toolbars use Java? If so, it could be related to the US Department of Homeland Security warning about Java?

Auto Enthusiast

I thought United was discontinuing their toolbar program because so many of us were swamping them with e-mail inquiries when our 1,000 bonus miles for downloading it weren't being posted on time.

fungirl

Yeh, they have a whole team "working" on it now [insert sarcasm here]. Here is the response I got:

We are very sorry for the delay in posting your 1,000 bonus miles to your account. There is a known issue with miles posting to your MileagePlus Shopping account and we have a team of representatives working towards a resolution. As soon as we have a resolution, we will follow up.
We appreciate your patience.

Justin Does...

I'm just glad that I have received some miles for monthly searches. At least that is some evidence that I had it installed correctly.

Andy Big Bear

Most of the toolbars aren't written in Java, they are written to target the native .NET runtime engine. Java, despite some recent and significant breaches that have been found in the language, actually puts a sandbox around most running code. Anything you download and install manually has the potential to be much more damaging than anything a malicious java exploit could perform.

Earthlings

So I'll still get my 1000 points even if I uninstall the toolbar right now? I thought it has been the right amount of time that they told people via messages that it should come up in so many weeks. And I think they should start arriving end of January first part of February at the earliest or latest.

onthego15

As far as I remember, there was never any requirement to keep the toolbar installed. The terms and conditions merely said that we would have to wait many weeks before the miles would post.

turbjuo

1000 miles just posted dated to jan 4th

maewest

good to see some of you getting the 1k posted - and getting more communication out of cartera than me. data points:

10/30 downloaded toolbar, completed search
11/20 emailed through milesplus shopping requesting credit
11/22 received email from Jesus about needing to wait 8-10wk from promo end 10/31
12/? miles from toolbar search finally post
1/7 email through milesplus shopping requesting credit (again)
1/9 received email from Jesus (same person?) stating 'A trouble ticket has been created for our technical department to review this issue. We will follow up with you shortly.'
1/15 replied to the 1/9 email from Jesus to check in since I have not yet received any follow up

Earthlings

no miles yet

StartinSanDiego

I read this thread when it first came out and was pleasantly surprised to find that uploading the AA toolbar would result in the same 1000 mile bonus for uploading, plus 1 mile for every 3 searches. I have emailed 3 times to chase down my points, and nothing! No points for the searches (although it appears they are forthcoming), and no record of the 1000 miles for the upload. Did anyone else see the offer for AA or was I sniffing glue or something? Cartera says there was no AA offer.

Grrrrrrr! What a waste of time.

samdori

I never heard about any AA offer. I only know about the 1000 UA offer and there also was a 500 US offer before that.