A genuine pet peeve of mine is companies changing their privacy policies or terms and conditions, sending out a notice e-mail that they’ve done so, but not saying in the e-mail what actually changed.
When companies send emails that they're changing their terms and conditions or privacy policy they should tell you what they changed. https://t.co/N5d1RFEcVD
— gary leff (@garyleff) March 30, 2026
They do this because they don’t want you to know and figure you’ll just delete the message. And most people will! But it’s rude, and it also leads to rampant speculation and misinformation about what they’ve done. That’s not great for.. them.
On Monday morning, Southwest Airlines sent out an email that their privacy policy had changed. I went and looked at it, compared a cached older version of the privacy policy and this new one, and didn’t think the changes were especially significant. However, there’s a lot of concern about it over on Reddit. They’re looking at changes that were actually made in January, not on March 30, but many of those look a bit ugly (but not as bad as they seem).
- The basic concern is that Southwest will use more tracking, profiling, and partner data sharing to drive dynamic pricing and merchandising.
- And the narrative frame is that as they abandon their skin as the old Southwest Airlines they become more evil, focused on surveillance, segmentation, and upsells.
The basic idea is that the privacy policy changes represent a shift moving toward “surveillance pricing,” using customer behavior and profile information to influence which fares, seat offers, and point prices customers see.
And it talks about the use of physical surveillance, biometrics and location tracking in the airport, tied to Touchless ID, push notifications, and crowd analytics.
If you always buy “Choice Extra” to get a premium seat, their algorithms may stop showing you the lowest “Basic” fares first.
* Willingness-to-Pay Data: The policy covers “historical seating data.” By knowing you’ve paid $40 for an exit row three times in a row, they can “dynamically” price that seat higher for you specifically, or push it as a “limited time” upgrade in the app.
* Variable Award Pricing: As of early 2026, Rapid Rewards points no longer have a fixed value ($0.013). They are now fully dynamic. The policy allows them to track your point-spending habits to adjust the “cost” of a flight in points based on your loyalty level.
The policy text doesn’t mention seating. And there’s not any indication at this point that rewards pricing varies by customer. These things could happen. It’s not always in Southwest’s interest, and things like seat pricing can be checked and potentially defeated by booking not logged in, with a different device or incognito browser. There’s discussion of biometrics around TSA Touchless and around logging into their mobile app.
But Southwest’s policy does say it can use session replay, collect mouse movements and screen captures, collect clickstream data, use location-identifying technologies, collect detailed inflight Wi‑Fi usage information including websites visited and app/use categories, capture audio and video at airports, combine automatically collected data with personal information, build usage profiles, retarget across other sites, and use data for automation and AI including training systems.
Southwest’s privacy policy is broad enough to allow heavy tracking, profiling, ad targeting, partner data use, and aggressive merchandising. That does not mean they’re engaging in profile-based dynamic pricing of fares and ancillaries. And it wasn’t actually the March update to the privacy policy that said they can do these things – they’d already done this in a prior update, they just didn’t tell anyone and it didn’t get attention.
The days of dynamic pricing are coming to a multitude of industry, not just Southwest and not just airlines. There’s too much profit to be made when a business can determine your “breaking point” for purchasing a good or service. I don’t see this trend being pulled back in part because too many people see technology, all of it, is simply amazing and you’re a loser if you oppose it.
@George Romey — Seems so. The question is… are we, consumers and citizens, just going to accept that? Because it seems like something that should be regulated, lest we just keep getting screwed (for the profits of a few). While some of y’all are ‘free market’ to the point of letting it kill us, I still think sensible regulation can be the necessary guardrails for a productive society. Or, we can just do the corporate feudalism that the oligarchs seem to want so badly.
Ha Ha Ha Ha! I’m loving the “specialness” that SW has banked upon now no longer being important to them. Welcome to the ranks (and I mean that as a stench) of all the other US airlines!!!! Assigned seating? Baggage fees that you said would never happen? What’s next SW? You are so stupid to have run away from want made you different and it will severely hurt you as that’s what most of your patrons came to you for and stated for….the specialness you are eliminating. Now we have disgruntled FAs handling your “valued customers” Ha Ha Ha Ha!
Herb will be rolling in his grave at how you are destroying HIS airline one step at a time! I’m absolutely LOVING this!
Regarding Drew’s take… pretty much right on for me. with free bags, free seats and the Companion pass, I never thought twice about flying and other airline besides SW. They went where i needed to go, sometimes nonstop, and treated me fairly. Now? I’ve flown about 8 flights so far this year and only 3 have been on SW. All because of their changes.
But that’s just me…