
American Airlines Doesn't Like Letting Your Traxo Account Access Your Data - bradleyjoyce
http://launchdfw.com/news/american-airlines-doesnt-like-letting-your-traxo-account-access-your-data/
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mcherm
Well, Traxo may bill themselves as "the Mint of travel", but I worked at banks
in the early days of Mint and before, and I remember how hard banks worked to
prevent aggregators like Yodlee from scraping their sites. At first, the banks
tried everything: I remember being asked to put in random HTML element changes
just in hopes of foiling the scraping. But eventually Yodlee "made peace" with
most of the banks by selling them services. (Mint originally used Yodlee
although today they have their own scraping technology.)

A little more than a decade later, it is a completely different world. Now
banks like mine have projects to create servers JUST FOR MINT to scrape. And
we do it because our customers are loudly clamoring for us to "work with
Mint". The scrapers just had to hang on for a few years through strong
resistance from the entrenched powers, and eventually they BECAME an
entrenched power themselves.

