Tuesday, October 02, 2007

Trip the Flight Fantastic

TripIt allows travelers to organize all the individually booked components of a trip (e.g. flight, hotel, car rental, exotic dancers, etc) in one place.

The recommended way to get started is for you to forward your email itineraries to a TripIt mail address. From the mail, TripIt extracts (scrapes) all the details and builds you a cohesive view of your plans. Apparently, it's this mechanism that sets TripIt apart from other services.

I was about to try it for an upcoming trip to Tokyo for a Liberty Alliance meeting when it occurred to me to check just what sort of personal information was in the itineraries I would be forwarding. I'd be giving them: Fullname, Email, Home Phone, Work Phone.

Not like it's credit card info, but I figured I'd check out their privacy policy anyways.

When you register with TripIt, we ask for the basics including your name, email address and password and allow you to provide us with other information including your travel information, history and preferences.

For all TripIt visitors, not just registered users, we collect information such as IP address, browser type, domain name, access times, duration of visit, referring URL, platform, new and repeat information, time stamp and exit page information.

It seems strange to me that they don't specifically call out the email forwarding mechanism (that which supposedly distinguishes them?) as a channel by which they collect PII, and instead hi-lite surfing stats.

I think I'll give it a try after suitably obfuscating my phone numbers before forwarding the itineraries email.

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