Next time you’re simultaneously snoring and drooling on a long-haul flight, you might want to check yourself, because your every move is reportedly being recorded.
This week, Cathay Pacific made headlines with a new privacy policy which states passengers will being recorded through their in-flight entertainment as well as at the airport. To make matters worse, the footage of you picking your nose mid-flight will apparently be stored for “as long as necessary.”
According to Forbes, Cathay Pacific’s new policy is part of a three-year restructure in response to a major data breach in 2018 which affected 9.4M Cathay customers.
The new policy includes fairly standard points, including the creation of customer profiles featuring meal preferences, frequent flyer info and passport details. However, other recorded information, like “your activity at airport departure and arrival halls,” and the collection of “your images captured via CCTV in our airport lounges and aircraft,” feels rather unnecessary.
In March this year, Cathay Pacific CEO Rupert Hogg said the tracking of customer behaviour was to better “understand what people like and what they don’t like,” but the policy states this personal data will be shared with “third party partners for marketing purposes.”
There are also major flaws to the policy, and in the communication of it to customers. Forbes reported that in an email to passengers, Cathay said “we want you to know that your personal information is secure,” but later on the policy says, “no data transmission…can be guaranteed to be secure.”
The publication also noted that Cathay’s policy makes privacy guarantees to certain markets, but not to all. For instance, “the European appendix notes some transaction details will be kept for six to ten years,” but “the general policy has no specific retention period.”
Either way, the thought of being secretly recorded via your in-flight entertainment system feels super creepy and intrusive, and is just another part of modern life that is no longer private.