[Michael Grothaus at FastCompany]

"United Airlines announced that it is bringing personalized advertising to the seatback entertainment screens on its flights. The move is aimed at increasing the airline’s revenue by leveraging the data that it has on its passengers."

Just another reason why friends don't let friends fly United. We should all be reducing our air travel overall anyway, given the climate crisis, and in a world where we all fly less, shouldn't we choose a better experience?

This sounds like the absolute worst:

"United believes its advertising network will be appealing to brands because “there is the potential for 3.5 hours of attention per traveler, based on average flight time.”"

Passengers from California, Colorado, Connecticut, Virginia, and Utah can opt out of having their private information used to show targeted ads to them for the duration of what sounds like an agonizing flight. Passengers from other US States are out of luck - at least until their legislatures also pass reasonable privacy legislation.

Other airlines are removing seat-back entertainment to reduce fuel, so on top of the baseline climate impact of the air travel industry, there's a real additional climate implication here. Planes with seat-back entertainment, in general, use more fuel; United is making a revenue decision with all kinds of negative impacts that they should not be rewarded for.

#Business

[Link]