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Your flight may soon be keeping an eye on everything from your in-flight snacks preferences to how long you travel in the bathroom.
Airbus announced this week that it has begun testing a new system to more closely monitor flight experience, including bathroom breaks and passenger preferences, which will help streamline flight crew services. and provide travelers with a "more personalized travel experience". The so-called Airspace Connected Experience experience will allow passengers to remotely control food and beverages, and to set favorite seating positions, for example, as well as viewing personalized entertainment and advertising, among other flight offerings.
Collecting data about everything from what passengers prefer to eat to what they like to buy or watch while flying creates huge revenue opportunities for airlines. The digitalization of flight experience also aims to improve efficiency, reduce costs and provide a wealth of data on air operations.
Among the key features of the tracking system is the fact that the passenger seatbelt is buckled – a task traditionally performed by human flight attendants – with green or red signals, according to Bloomberg, up to time that the passenger passes in the toilet. An Airbus spokesperson informed Gizmodo by e-mail that the belt sensor system would allow the flight crew to warn an unfrozen passenger to do so or to avoid disturbing a sleeping passenger whose belt is already closed.
Regarding toilet tracking, Airbus is also testing camera systems located outside the toilets to keep track of passengers' waiting times and avoid blockages. ;interview. A spokesperson told Gizmodo by e-mail that this system "will help airlines to provide their passengers with the appropriate amount of [lavatory] facilities / equipment they need on board, including knowing the level of demand during peak periods. The sensors could also alert the cabin crew if someone was locked in the laundry for a very long time – who could be sick or need assistance. "
The Airbus representative stated that the toilet cameras would be tasked with tracking the number of people waiting and at what time, as well as the speed at which the line of alignment moves. But the company did not answer additional questions about the operation of this fuzzy system. Instead, he highlighted an image of the platform published at Conde Nast Traveler describing fuzzy faces that seems to raise more questions than answers.
In a press release issued in April, Airbus said that in addition to passenger data made available to the flight crew, "it is also expected that consolidated information will also be uploaded to the cloud. Skywise for further analysis of trends. " (Skywise is the Airbus) open database.) In addition, in this week's release, Airbus said that passengers would benefit from personalized experiences "specifically tailored to the needs and preferences of each, on the available data "and" tailored tailor-made flight ". [in-flight entertainment] offer."
However, when he was contacted to comment on what information could be stored, the Airbus spokesman told Gizmodo, in a response regarding seatbelt sensors and toilet tracking, that for "All of these cases, no passengers are" tracked "and that their identity or personal information not stored." Asked if the system would track items such as food preferences, entertainment and advertisements, the door replied: "No. Skywise is for the analysis of trends and reliability of equipment, it does not follow passengers."
Asked if Airbus would make the collected data profitable, the spokesperson provided a somewhat confusing answer:
Regarding the "monetization" of the data, the answer is "no".
Knowing what's cooking in the oven or how many people are lining up in front of the toilet is not something that would be or could be monetized. This type of data simply allows airlines to operate more efficiently and to ensure that passengers have everything they need – from delivering the right meal to the amount of time available on the plane, especially at peak times.
Awesome! May be. But as for the implication that flight data could not be monetized, this is simply not true. There is every reason to believe that the activities of passengers on a flight would provide monetizable data that could be useful to other airlines, aircraft manufacturers, credit card companies, and no one knows.
When asked if he could provide a copy of the conditions of service that passengers would sign before taking a plane equipped with the system, AirBus explained that these documents would be processed by the individual airlines once the tests completed. So, unfortunately, there is no way of knowing what rights you will give away before this system is routed to a diffuse set of airlines with slightly different agreements, buried between countless pages.
Let's recap here: the AirBus system follows a lot of activities that passengers are forced to do during a flight (and this list of activities can certainly get longer), but according to AirBus, this does not correspond, I repeat, to " passenger surveillance ". The kind of chopping and lack of direct communication make you feel comfortable getting on a plane weighing hundreds of tons crossing the sky at hundreds of kilometers at the hour, then welcome you to edge. We hope you enjoy flying into the future skies of the future data and that everything will be better than when we thought it was not serious, to let the stupid social networks collect all the data possible.
Airbus said it was testing the system on its A350-900 Flight Lab. Bloomberg further indicated that the company "plans to introduce it on the A321 family in 2021, followed by the larger A350 series with two aisles two years later".
Follow-up, for example if all seat belts are buckled before take-off and knowing which toilets need to be replenished in advance, will undoubtedly give the flight crew an advantage in terms of # 39; s efficiency. But at the same time, without a clearer idea of how this data is used, Connected Experience raises many questions about the protection of privacy. Questions such as: Do we really want to transmit personal data for each flight? Is it really necessary? Is biometric screening seriously inadequate?
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