Now I am no fan of Apple’s I think that they do charge more than they should for many of their products, but that is certainly no reason for another company to try and take advantage of any particular set of users. This is apparently what Obtiz has done with their travel search.

It would seem that they have decided to steer Mac owners to their higher priced offerings. According to some this is typical targeted advertising, but considering the fact that Obitz might have been using data claiming that a Mac household makes on average 20,000 more than a PC house it sounds more like fraud to us.

However, this type of activity is really minor compared to what is really going on with advertising, data collection and many other activities that happen behind the consumers backs. It is one of the things that many privacy advocates are trying to fix as people’s information is now traded like a commodity in some cases. This is also part of the push for the “do not track” initiative (which will not fix the issue).

We have covered how both Google and Facebook are fighting for your data so that they can trade it off or sell very targeted ads pushed out to the many millions of people that connect to those sites every day. We are not going to go into their transgressions again here, but just remember that according to the current laws what Orbitz did might not be ethical, but it is also not illegal. This last piece is what is the most concerning, right now because it is a common practice the chances of any legal action against Orbitz is not high. We have already seen one judge cite “common business practices” while throwing out a case over tracking user movements and preferences, so this one will probably do nothing to change how Orbitz does business.

Instead it might make users (Mac and PC) much more careful with their online buying habits when looking for anything. You might end up pushed to something that will never be a good deal.

Discuss this in our Forum