Is this the creepiest business practice ever?

No, too much of an invasion of privacy.
Closer to home in my little community there is a billboard on our rural highway advertising ” Young hands massage.” lol
Creepy, I mean really, could they not come up with a more appealing name for their practice? haha

This is not a British Airways issue, but a company that has bought into Google’s creepiness.

Did you know that if you use Gmail that they scrape your emails for keywords that help populate and target ads to you?
This is also done for any google search you do to “help improve your search experience”. They crunch PetaBytes of data all for our good.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a company basher, but I find the approach and tactics that google goes to is a bit creepy.

@blueiiznh true but does that mean you’d like the checkin clerk commenting on you’re beach snaps on the flight home from your holiday.

I think it might be a front for something else more sinister but it’s definitely creepy. I don’t like complete strangers calling me out by name even when I’m wearing a name tag

I think it’s downright creepy, but if they google my real name they won’t find anything that relates to me, and I don’t use my online name when I book stuff like that.

I think Google itself is the creepiest business on the planet, with Facebook a close second. Big Brother is here, and we are giving him all the information he wants without even thinking twice about it.

Creepy and stupid.

I think we are all in agreement why it is creepy, so here is why I think it is stupid:

1 – Mistakes, a lot of people have the same name and it will be hard to find reliable info. They could end up greeting people with irrelevant things.

2— Shut up and let me on the plain, while you are telling Mr Smith how nice his wife looks in her photos, I’m getting pissed off that my long day just got made longer

3— How are they going to memorize these bits of info when they have so many passangers and such short turn around times. At best this will be a half assed attempt to remember things about some passengers and not others, thus making them feel “not so special”.

4— Who is paying for this? the extra work requires extra staff, this costs money, so by how much does my flight cost go up in a market with already competitive prices?

5— Oh wow, I am so impressed, you know how to use google. You must really like me and value me as a person, there is no way this is a transparent cheap ass kissing exercise. not.

Long story short, I will no longer fly with British airways. Furthermore, I will now start a graphic blog about how fun it must be to strangle flight attendants, and how horny it makes me thinking about shoving that little pack of peanuts up their ass. Lets see them give me an honest greeting now.

I agree with @poisonedantidote creepy perhaps – stupid for sure.

I agree with others in that google goes overboard creepy with stuff & I’m half happy & half weirded out when the other brother starts admonishing & fining google for their privacy infractions. Personally I appreciate to a certain extent the attention to my details that google & others pay – simply because it is already a given that I will be marketed to & that it’s annoying but it’d sure be a more pleasant experience if the marketing was actually something I had the potential to be interested in. I’d love it if google could make all the great things I pin in pinterest show up in ads organized by lowest price etc. That’d be convenient & lots more pleasant that the randomness I get while watching tv at dinnertime being bombarded with images of herpes & Viagra meds commercials & women tellin me why I need activia & putting nasty images in my head with all their not so fresh feeling ads etc. Creepy as it is the opposite side of the coin is that I’m getting targeted ads rather than wasted crap in comparison to what it could be.

It is apparently considered best practice in terms of marketing. We have a program on television here called The Gruen Transfer and they were discussing another airline, KLM and how they scan social media to find out what people are saying about them and then buy gifts for their customers to encourage them to post positive comments about them. They suggest they are “random acts of kindness” but of course it is a carefully considered marketing strategy. This is a blog that discusses how creepy this behaviour is. So British Airways is just keeping up with their competition.

Many magazine telemarketing companies beat them out by a longshot. Calling their own customers up to tell them to give them account information for verification purposes only, and then once you do that they throw another account at you. Oh, and they do even much worse things than that, and fighting them legally is a bitch. After thousands of complaints by other victims I don’t even know how they stay in business without being arrested or at least shut down.

I made the mistake of using a magazine telemarketer some 15 years ago, and they would consistently call you, trying to get you to say things on the phone, with their own ‘legal departments’ right at their side. I’d lost several thousand dollars not only to them, but trying to fight them with a lawyer when I couldn’t get the BBB or the Attorney General to help me. Don’t repeat after me here, and hang up on them!