Article 4MZ20 Airline tracks Twitter user’s real-world ID, publishes her flight number

Airline tracks Twitter user’s real-world ID, publishes her flight number

by
Dan Goodin
from Ars Technica - All content on (#4MZ20)
airline-tracker-800x861.jpeg

Enlarge

A security consultant who took to Twitter to call out inappropriate comments made by a Southwest Airline flight attendant received a surprising response when the airline's official Twitter account included her flight number in its reply while the flight had yet to take off.

The consultant, peeved that the airline tracked down her real-world identity and then broadcast her location, sent a follow-up saying the number amounted to personally identifiable information that the airline was obligated to keep private. The airline's response: flight numbers aren't PII. The conversation started out with a tweets like this one, reporting that an attendant on the flight she was boarding was making jokes some passengers found to be offensive:

Forgive me because I don't often fly this airline, but are there boundaries around jokes made by FAs or is that totally at their discretion?@SouthwestAir

- Jackie (@find_evil) August 8, 2019

A Southwest representative using the name Emilia responded with this:

Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

index?i=RrxkQswWxt8:6AxP09dKhe8:V_sGLiPB index?i=RrxkQswWxt8:6AxP09dKhe8:F7zBnMyn index?d=qj6IDK7rITs index?d=yIl2AUoC8zA
External Content
Source RSS or Atom Feed
Feed Location http://feeds.arstechnica.com/arstechnica/index
Feed Title Ars Technica - All content
Feed Link https://arstechnica.com/
Reply 0 comments