Award Wallet Responds To My Posts About The American Airlines Situation

AA, American Airlines, Award Wallet

Last Friday I wrote about AA forcing Award Wallet to discontinue the browser extension. This has made a lot of people annoyed and upset at American Airlines. Many feel that AA is not playing fairly with a small company and has other issues to worry about while in bankruptcy.

A couple of hours after publishing the above post, I received an e-mail from AA regarding Award Wallet which you can read here. American Airlines is saying that security is the issue with our miles being tracked on AW.

The weekend passed and there wasn’t much else to report regarding AA and Award Wallet until today.

I was checking e-mail from my phone and had a message from the President of AwardWallet, Jeff Bianco regarding the response I received from AA. A few hours later, I also had a comment on my AA Response post from Alexi Vereschaga, Co-Founder & CTO of AwardWallet.

Here is what they had to say: 
E-Mail from Jeff Bianco, President of AwardWallet:

American Airlines response to you is missing the point.

AwardWallet’s browser extension allows you the user,to store your username and password on your own computer.  It was never transmitted to AwardWallet.  Your computer accesses the AA.com site and stores the resulting balance information locally on your computer.  It is then displayed within the context of AwardWallet but the information was not transmitted to our site or our servers. 

Their response to you makes no sense in regard to AwardWallet.  It may make sense in regard to other mileage tracking sitesbut not in regard to what we were doing.

Comment to my AA response post from Alexi Vereschaga,Co-Founder & CTO of AW  

Hi, this is Alexi from AwardWallet. I just wanted to point out one important thing – AwardWallet (a third party website) is not accessing aa.com and is not storing any data related to AA in our database. With the browser extension it is the user who is accessing their site via their own browser and all the data is stored in that browser so it never reaches our server at any point.

Based on what AwardWallet is saying, it does seem like American’s talk of security being an issue makes little sense. I do want to believe the reasoning AA has given me but if all of the data is being stored locally on our own computers how can this be?
If AwardWallet does not have any of our information transmitted to their servers, then how is security really an issue?

I am going to send the Award Wallet responses to the PR rep for American Airlines. Hopefully he will get back to me.
I also plan to e-mail the president of Award Wallet to see why he thinks American is so against being tracked on their site.

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