American Airlines Has Cameras in Their Screens Too

It's a thoroughly miserable process no matter what way you slice it.

Hell there aren't mass shootings in China either. Again, authoritarians often cite Order as the result of just giving in to their oppressive tactics.

flying domestically I had my eyes scanned and thumb print taken, and was tracked more or less everywhere I went.

Are you arguing this is a good thing?

It's not just productivity - after a 6 hour flight starting from midnight, I have no idea how people are allowed to drive. I hear complaints about "why do people stand up immediately when the plane lands?" - I stand up so that I'll have enough feeling in my leg that I can actually walk off the plane by the time the doors open. Every bit of you is reduced by the time you're clumping off that airplane.

They could have analytics that say "Passenger X (profile: male, paid with a platinum credit card, flew 5 times in the last 6 months) watched movie Y for 40 minutes before looking up the price for the WiFi connectivity and deciding against it (pressing Cancel) after 2 minutes. Passenger turned off the display and only turned it on again 2 hours later at 9:45 PM (the flight attendants started serving food at 9:40 PM), suggesting the passenger slept until they started serving dinner.", but for that they don't need a camera, they can just use analytics software that already monitor your activity inside mobile apps.

Do you have reason to believe otherwise? If so, you should take the bet. Otherwise, readers have no reason to believe someone who isn't willing to put their money over their mouth is, over someone who is. Especially if you don't even bother to give reasons for your belief.

But I think a lot of what we sometimes label whataboutism is just people marveling how people in general are just so terrible at risk assessment that they'll latch onto minimal-risk items and get outraged about them, while at the same time engaging in higher-risk activities in the same context.

But there's also the fact that the "what about"-er has no idea what the parent poster is concerned with; saying they're "ignoring actual privacy violations being done by e.g. Facebook or Twitter, or the millions of ad networks" might be entirely false. Maybe they're concerned about both things.

All we have is a word from some dude. A very irresponsible one, if his claims are true.

Delta and GoGo just launched a “wireless IFE” on the new A220 that is basically just a customized Android tablet sucking down/streaming the IFE stuff from a server either in the back of the plane or from satellites using the 2k WiFi system (likely the server on the plane, but admittedly I haven’t looked into the tech specifics), which is designed to be modular for this reason.

Plus, if you’re not reliant on the IFE boxes under the seats (which the Linux/BusyBox units were), you can do a lot of the processing and serving and network stuff on the device rather than having to have those outated and expensive to upgrade computers in each row. Probably just a cheap to get a capricituve screen 10” tablet screen with a Mediatek quad-core professor and 2GB of RAM as if would be to get one “naked” too.

But if this is custom hardware then somebody must have wanted these cameras on there? To what end?

The boards still had markings for the tablet parts and even reported themselves as some random consumer tablet you can find on Alibaba over ADB.

Not much of a difference from an end-user perspective

And for those wondering, we also got cameras for "free" depending on the model. It's not that we needed a camera, but some screen sizes already came with a camera embedded in the screen and their pricing was not out of line with the ones that didn't have cameras so we'd get them for other reasons.

Not any tablet - I refer you to the 18" Samsung Galaxy View.

Most people don't care (yet) about their privacy, as evidenced by the scads of money that scummy data companies like Facebook et al are making selling our lives to advertisers.

Military and hospitals alone would strike me as being a big enough market to at least deserve a SKU/option.

Nice. I guess this is the psychological equivalent of crappy hospital food right when your body is recovering and has the highest need of nutrients.

The big trend in international business class (both with US domestic and foreign carriers) is to make the seats as private as possible. Delta has doors on the A350, Qatar does something similar on the QSuite (which can be configured even for four people to have their only little pod and a double bed for couples), and others are following suit.

For those of us who travel extensively for work (especially international travel) and are expected to be ready to go upon landing (I sometimes have meetings or stage rehearsals within ours of landing after a 10+ hour flight -- though I usually try to arrange my travel so I have at least a night before to adjust, that isn't always possible), sleeping on planes is imperative and it's why you pay thousands of dollars for a lay-flat seat in a private cocoon for business class.

Also, people who do video conferencing on airplanes are the worst. The absolute worst. (Unless you're in one of the private first-class suites I'll never be able to afford, then knock yourself out.)

https://www.ziosk.com/the-experience

"Scan coupons and gift cards with the built-in camera"

Given the tablets can't even scroll through a list of movies without lagging and show everyone the same 2 minute Honda commercial before each movie despite already knowing who you are from your ID and frequent flyer number, I'd venture that the airlines haven't figured out how to do eye tracking yet.

Really? I've never had that expectation. I consider it the same as sitting on a seat on a public transit bus or subway train.

I still think the airline should disclose when and how they're recording me, but an expectation of privacy? Nah.

I guess the whole controversy seems very knee-jerk and out of touch with the existing level of monitoring already on board the plane and in the airport.

Deployed since 2004 to look for camcorders.[1] Disney tried out technology for recording audience engagement in a theater in 2017. [2][3] "We instrumented a 400 seat movie theater using four infra-red (IR) cameras and four IR illuminators placed above the projection screen. The cameras were outfitted with IR bandpass filters to remove the spill of visible light that reflected off the movie screen. The video was recorded at 12 frames per second with a resolution of 2750×2200 pixels. The resolution of faces ranged from 15×25 (back rows) to 40×55 (front rows). We collected over 150 viewings of 9 mainstream movies released in 2015 and 2016". They show graphs for laughing and smiling over time for Inside Out. So it works. Coming soon to a theater near you, probably.

Cinemark installed intensive surveillance of the concession stand.[4] That's where the money is made. "The concessions people could look through every kids’ combo that was sold across a region and see whether they are actually attracting children or if they are trading down college-aged women who would’ve bought a larger size of all of those items if you didn’t have that meal option for them."

[1] http://www.pirateeye.com/pirateeye/technology/

[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20171116222427/https://www.disne...

[3] https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/disneyresearch/wp-content...

[4] http://www.filmjournal.com/content/envysion-better-business-...

A shopping mall might be privately owned, but it's still a public space. Any place that is open to the general public is a public space.

I mean, yeah, it's conceivable that someone could try that. It is also conceivable that it would fail miserably.

If you turn down your volume too much on your phone, it pauses the advert and demands to raise volume to continue.

It's not public in the fact that you cannot just legally waltz into somebody else's airplane without permission. You pay a company to manage the experience in the airplane within their powers. It is perfectly fine for consumers to question why a hitherto unspoken contract about cameras directly observing a passenger's seat has been broken, and the camera placed there entirely as a result of the plane's owners.

It's the difference between a neighbor, and a neighbor who is also an informant.

Now getting into ML. What are those cheap cameras we buy in Amazon going to be capable of in 10 years - auto-recording/notification options for: nose-picking, peeing, nipple flash/down-blouse/upskirt, screaming... IDENTIFYING people by name?

Beyond this, what about public places that are gender specific- bathrooms. Heck, we may even see bathroom stall camera's that aren't "watched" by anyone but ML - just for theft monitoring. If that happens we'll likely find out, yet again, that someone with eyes was watching after all.

I get that each generation doesn't really understand how it was in the past, and just pops up into whatever privacy shit we're doing today, but we just keep letting it slide.

My point is, the needle is moving with these small changes.

You already have a number of replies covering some good ground, but there is a word covering the feeling I don't see yet: stalking. There is a fundamental difference in feeling (and a legally recognized one as well) between being seen/heard a specific coincidental instances by a crowd of random strangers whom one might quite reasonably expect to never encounter again in their entire lives -versus- having a single person individual or organization conduct persistent surveillance of you. This isn't some weird obscure situation either is it? The uncomfortableness level seems to be pretty universal. The other unrelated passengers on the airplane are generally going to be an entirely random and diverse group of total strangers. They're unlikely to remember you, to care, or to have any particular interest in you, let alone the ability and volume of information necessary to affect you.

But the airliner is a singular entity, and in this instance it's actually fairly illuminating to apply the "personhood" idea to it and consider it as if a single powerful person was following you and recording you constantly. That person does have a direct economic interest in you, may wield a certain level of monopoly power depending on location, or alternately can easily potentially collaborate with a small number of other "persons" with your information. The person will not forget and can follow you over decades. They can do the same to friends, relatives and acquaintances, drawing inferences and information from higher level social network graphs that would not be discernible from a small given slice.

Now you might not care about this yourself, but you should still be able to recognize that it's something quite different then merely "being in public amongst instantiated strangers". Historically it has been perfectly reasonable from an information theory point of view to have a certain expectation of common likely "anonymity in a crowd", because it's not physically possible for a single human to remember tens of thousands of people. Historically when attempts have been made to use some minimal level of technology and large numbers of bodies to implement mass surveillance and centralized recording an analysis it has made people quite uncomfortable (the Stasi say). There is no reason why advancing technology making it cheaper and requiring less bodies would make people suddenly be fine with it would it?

Scale sometimes brings emergent effects that are a pure function of large numbers. You can't always do a clean extrapolation.