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Comment by baybal2 | Hacker News Reader

Yes, they do, in fact, almost everybody in the travel industry can get its hands on PNRs, and manifests.

A travel history of almost everybody can be reconstructed fully for the last ~10 years from those databases.

And of course that stuff went to .onion sites.

That's just like almost everybody's financial information collected, and reported for the sake of "counterterrorism" (CRS,) and, soon, SIM card subscriber data.

Up until quite recently, a number of countries had access to every bank transaction in the world going through SWIFT in Switzerland.

Every time you pass the border in the airport, the guy in the booth can google pretty much every administrative record about you down to things like your parking tickets. Not to say, things like criminal records are an open book across "developed" countries.

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Citation needed. Anybody can become a travel agent with a GDS subscription, but how exactly would I leverage that to get flight manifests for other people? Airlines guard anything that smacks like seat utilization data jealously, which is why even the GDS will never show more than 9 seats open in any fare class.

Yes, please. I'm sure all nation states and intelligence agencies have complete access, but to say any travel agent also has travel records of everyone for the past decade is an extraordinary statement that requires evidence.

You type LP/ABC123/MAY25 and pull up the loading list.

This doesn't give you information about load factors or overbooking profiles which is the actually commercially sensitive information.

Well, damn, I stand corrected. Here's the documentation for the List Passengers (LP) command on Amadeus:

http://www.amadeus.com/ir/documents/aco/ir/en/Quick6.pdf

Not sure what country you're referring to but I highly doubt border control agents have access to parking tickets.

Typical HN comment that assumes technical feasibility is the only limiting factor in the universe.

But they do? You have to pay any open fines before you leave the country. At least that's how it works here.

Nah. First they make the car rental company figure out who you were, so they can late charge your credit card for their trouble. Then they wait an year or so before figuring out where you live, before mailing the invoice to you, so they can claim 2x to 4x late fees in addition to the original fine.

And then you have to go through the trouble of contacting them to figure out if it's a real claim, or just someone trying to scam you.

Edit: I've only heard a third party account on this, but I have no reason to doubt the validity.

I was on a trip in 2019 where some members of the group were stopped at the airport terminal to pay minor traffic fines (crosswalk stuff, iirc). They weren't allowed to depart until they paid.

where exactly?

Just a side note - it's peculiar how we use "googling" as a synonym of searching. The guy you've mentioned won't be using google and I hope he doesn't have google on the device to fetch all necessary data

Does google still make search appliances?

I had thought that it was discontinued years ago, but apparently they only started phasing it out in 2016 and finally shut it down in 2019. [1]

[1] https://www.cmswire.com/information-management/google-search...

I don't think it is. While a lot of folks don't use google, a lot of folks do, and have for a while. It isn't like it is the first time a brand became something more: Band-aid and Kleenex are items as well as brands, for example. You might Xerox that contract, too, even though you probably aren't using a Xerox brand machine to do so. Maybe you call all soda a "coke" - and asked someone, "What flavor of coke do you want?" - with Mountain Dew being a perfectly acceptable answer. (This last example isn't as widespread).

While not completely alien here in the UK, using brand names for generic concepts is a bit of an Americanism (perhaps because of a cultural tendency to glorify private business?)

"Band-aids" are plasters (short for sticking plasters) here, and "Kleenex" are tissues (even if they're actually kleenex branded).

Having said that, to "google" something or to "photoshop" something are both in common usage here. I suspect the difference has to do with the dominance of those products in their respective categories meaning that chances are you really will be using google or photoshop when you look something up. Although I can't imagine someone here using "google" in the context above to denote a specific, clearly non-google, search tool.

I think it's cultural. We have some brand names where I believe Americans don't, for example. For example, we hoover where Americans vacuum.

Jeep is another example that got plenty of use outside America, only really falling out of use in the last while as casual use of that type of vehicle got replaced by SUVs.

A jeep (in the casual, not the brand sense) is a different thing than a SUV though? When I think of "jeep", I think of a Jeep Wrangler-type vehicle, which is a much different thing than a SUV.

Right, but people who 20 years ago for reasons other than needing the ruggedness would have driven jeeps now mostly drive SUVs.

I'm not saying that people call them SUVs now. I'm saying they buy SUVs instead if they just want a big vehicle to use on road.

A widespread example of this phenomenon in Poland is calling a particular form factor of shoes "adidas" (plural: "adidasy"), regardless of the brand or manufacturer. In fact, I can't think of another word to refer to this shoe category. Another one is "kserokopiarka" for "photocopier" (and thus "skserować" for "to photocopy"), which derives from Xerox. And I think using "jeep" (pronounced as in English) for a class of cars is also common. And, of course, we Google stuff on the Internet instead of looking it up.

But other than these, I don't recall any popular examples of brands turning into generic nouns in Polish.

To "xerox" is or was to photocopy, in the US too.

At least in my circle no one is asking to pass the 'chocolate hazelnut spread' everyone calls it Nutella, even if it is not the Ferrero brand. Not US

I remember a C3 talk showing how ridiculously insecure these booking systems (GDS) were. You should assume every intelligence agency has their hands on this data, as it is shared among so many parties.

https://media.ccc.de/v/33c3-7964-where_in_the_world_is_carme...

SWIFT is headquartered in Belgium.

My bad

You were not completely wrong.

There is a long story of state agents trying to access SWIFT messages. At some point, SWIFT had to set up a backup data center in Switzerland in order to route European transactions within Europe. The other data center is in the Netherlands.

...And the American data center is not far from NSA HQ.

And they do not have a data center in Asia.

Yes, as far I know, every at least international flight from EU, the US gets the full information about every passenger, inclusive payment (credit card info).

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