A new passenger privacy issue airlines must soon confront

Do airline passengers want airlines to keep track of their inflight entertainment (IFE) activity? If you’re a frequent flyer, do you want Airline X to keep a data file on which movies and television programs you watch during flights? Which websites you browsed while flying? How much time you spent sending emails during your last flight? Do you want an airline to have access to your Outlook calendar so the carrier can better accommodate your schedule when a flight is delayed or canceled?

These are questions that soon will have to be confronted by airlines that increasingly have the ability to collect, track and analyze reams of data on passenger behavior. What is the line between providing passengers with customized customer service and violating privacy?

Part of a video presentation during a briefing Thales USA CEO Alan Pellegrini gave journalists this week caught my eye. It was an animated overview of an aircraft cabin. Labels showed what passengers in various seats were doing. The passenger in one seat, say 8A, was sending emails. The passenger in another seat was watching a specific movie, and so on. With more sophisticated, Internet-enabled IFE systems being installed on aircraft—and passengers able to connect their own mobile devices to onboard Wi-Fi and IFE provided by carriers—airlines more and more will be able to know and track exactly what a passenger is doing while flying.

Pellegrini was careful to note that Thales, among other things a major player in the next-generation IFE market, won’t be collecting and storing any of this information. But it will be an “enabler” to allow airlines to track and gather such information.

Pellegrini pointed out that consumers using, for example, iPads and Kindle are already familiar with this kind of information tracking. He cited the way iPad’s “Genius” feature works regarding books. “If you liked reading Don DeLillo’s Underworld, you would like this book by Philip Roth,” suggests the iPad feature, so rather than searching for a “needle in a haystack,” the feature lets you quickly move on to another novel, Pellegrini explained, adding, “Airlines will be able to do similar things once they know and understand your habits and experiences.”

This can be part of an “enhanced customer experience” in which airlines tailor services, particularly for frequent flyers. A passenger can take his or her seat and, based on the films they watched on their last flight or flights, can be recommended a movie by the IFE system. With IFE systems increasingly having vast libraries of entertainment options, “you can spend the first hour of your flight trying to figure out what you want to watch,” Pellegrini said, noting that carriers could help passengers significantly shorten this search time.

How about an airline having access to Outlook calendars? If there’s a flight cancellation, an airline could “recommend the next flight to you based on what’s in your Outlook,” Pellegrini explained. “How do I treat this passenger who has flown 2 million miles? Maybe it’s giving him a conference room in an airport lounge because you know he’s going to miss a meeting” based on having access to the passenger’s Outlook calendar.

Airlines need to consider the privacy implications of all of this. So far, Pellegrini noted, privacy concerns in aviation have largely been associated with security. “Everyone’s been so focused on security, [but] now privacy [related to, for example, IFE habits] is becoming an issue,” he said. “Airlines want to do what’s best for passengers [in terms of customizing the flying experience], but at the same time they have to be respectful of privacy. We haven’t confronted that in all aspects in aviation yet for sure.”

One solution may be allowing passengers to opt in—or out—of giving airlines permission to track their IFE habits and Outlook calendars. This is an issue that will have to be confronted sooner rather than later because airlines are realizing they can access this kind of information to better customize the flying experience, especially for their highest-spending passengers. “For airlines, the light has gone on,” Pellegrini said.