Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 457 posts

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#91

Post by no-name-here »

xrd wrote: post #19

About twenty years ago, I was taking a flight back from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to the US. In the middle of the night the pilot got on the loudspeaker and said "hi! Having some engine trouble, so we are landing in Manaus." Manaus is in the middle of the Amazon. Needless to say, a bit scary to hear that, but we landed without issue. They told us we had two choices: the nice hotel with a shared room, or the lesser nice…

> If Google wanted to sell a product to the airlines that offered to keep annoying people like me from purchasing flights, they could do that with that email chain. I'm skeptical it'll be wiped correctly. Isn't my poor writing style basically my signature?

The OP article is quite poor in terms of information provided, but the buyer (Google) had to explicitly agree not to attempt to re-identify users. https://www.axios.com/2026/08/17/google-spirit-airlines-bank...

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#92

Post by mr_toad »

budman1 wrote: post #72
Ekaros wrote: post #18

Anyone else somewhat weirded by current state of affairs that this sort of information is valuable enough to even bother selling... And that it actually happens... It feels like some societies are in really weird place.

How does this have value? Is any and every sentence in an e-mail considered 'fact' and thus to be fed into the AI? 90% of e-mails and Teams communications are inane. Polite banter, "thanks for taking care of that, I appreciate it" "please route the forms to Janet this week because Bill is on vacation" "unit will be un available until the parts come in" . I can't see the intrinsic fact value of this kind of communicat…

It will have a different writing style from the average blog post. Maybe they just want to train an AI that sounds less like an AI. Or one that speaks in vapid management style.

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#93

Post by tiahura »

elric wrote: post #28
xrd wrote: post #19

About twenty years ago, I was taking a flight back from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to the US. In the middle of the night the pilot got on the loudspeaker and said "hi! Having some engine trouble, so we are landing in Manaus." Manaus is in the middle of the Amazon. Needless to say, a bit scary to hear that, but we landed without issue. They told us we had two choices: the nice hotel with a shared room, or the lesser nice…

I fully share your concerns. And I don't understand how apparently tons of Teams and email conversations can be archived and sold without any kind of scrutiny. How can such data be sold without the consent of all involved parties? What gives Google the right to use it to train LLMs? Is that just a way of washing away the legal protections?

[flagged]

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#94

Post by BlackRing »

gspr wrote: post #80
xrd wrote: post #19

About twenty years ago, I was taking a flight back from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to the US. In the middle of the night the pilot got on the loudspeaker and said "hi! Having some engine trouble, so we are landing in Manaus." Manaus is in the middle of the Amazon. Needless to say, a bit scary to hear that, but we landed without issue. They told us we had two choices: the nice hotel with a shared room, or the lesser nice…

And this is why data protection laws, like the (imperfect) EU ones that are so lamented here on HN, are necessary.

That's because they're seemingly perfunctory. What's worse than no law is a bad one that doesn't do anything but make you feel like something is actually being done.

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#97

Post by TeMPOraL »

budman1 wrote: post #72
Ekaros wrote: post #18

Anyone else somewhat weirded by current state of affairs that this sort of information is valuable enough to even bother selling... And that it actually happens... It feels like some societies are in really weird place.

How does this have value? Is any and every sentence in an e-mail considered 'fact' and thus to be fed into the AI? 90% of e-mails and Teams communications are inane. Polite banter, "thanks for taking care of that, I appreciate it" "please route the forms to Janet this week because Bill is on vacation" "unit will be un available until the parts come in" . I can't see the intrinsic fact value of this kind of communicat…

LLMs aren't a database. They're an attempt at brute-forcing an artificial mind. The who and what aren't really interesting there, it'll forget most of such details anyway. What matters is the patterns visible in the text at various scales. How people write. Why they write. To whom they write, in response to what. How does e-mails about mistakes correlate with PDFs they're referring to. How people work with ticketing systems - like how, actually, a ticket plays out. The jargon, the acronyms, the vibes, the causal links. It's all in there, and it's another slice through the set of things humans do, to be combined with other slices already in the training data, and enriching the whole.

(Something something we will add your distinctiveness to our own, you will be assimilated, ...)

(Hell, the fact that it's all from one org would make it a great dataset to have in the open for sociological studies. I bet that today, aided by LLMs to sift through it, you could use it to map how information flows through a large org - how incident on the floor travels through time and layers of management until it reaches the C-suite, what of it survives, how it gets reacted to, how the reactions flow down...)

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#98

Post by nxobject »

no-name-here wrote: post #91
xrd wrote: post #19

About twenty years ago, I was taking a flight back from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to the US. In the middle of the night the pilot got on the loudspeaker and said "hi! Having some engine trouble, so we are landing in Manaus." Manaus is in the middle of the Amazon. Needless to say, a bit scary to hear that, but we landed without issue. They told us we had two choices: the nice hotel with a shared room, or the lesser nice…

> If Google wanted to sell a product to the airlines that offered to keep annoying people like me from purchasing flights, they could do that with that email chain. I'm skeptical it'll be wiped correctly. Isn't my poor writing style basically my signature? The OP article is quite poor in terms of information provided, but the buyer (Google) had to explicitly agree not to attempt to re-identify users. https://www.axio…

I'd be amused if a sub-sub-agent organically decided to do it anyway - even if just for a notable figure that an LLM can identify with its weights alone. What are the controls? Who's going to keep Google accountable? Hah.

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#99

Post by anon373839 »

budman1 wrote: post #72
Ekaros wrote: post #18

Anyone else somewhat weirded by current state of affairs that this sort of information is valuable enough to even bother selling... And that it actually happens... It feels like some societies are in really weird place.

How does this have value? Is any and every sentence in an e-mail considered 'fact' and thus to be fed into the AI? 90% of e-mails and Teams communications are inane. Polite banter, "thanks for taking care of that, I appreciate it" "please route the forms to Janet this week because Bill is on vacation" "unit will be un available until the parts come in" . I can't see the intrinsic fact value of this kind of communicat…

> How does this have value? Is any and every sentence in an e-mail considered 'fact' and thus to be fed into the AI?

I have a hunch what this is for. AI companies want to make bigger inroads into nontechnical work settings. But LLM progress outside of fields where verifiable rewards for RL post-training can be synthetically generated (coding, math) has been pretty flat. Buying years of operational data from a company like an airline could be used to reconstruct long-horizon task trajectories in areas like customer service or marketing.

Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

#100

Post by jmyeet »

xrd wrote: post #19

About twenty years ago, I was taking a flight back from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil to the US. In the middle of the night the pilot got on the loudspeaker and said "hi! Having some engine trouble, so we are landing in Manaus." Manaus is in the middle of the Amazon. Needless to say, a bit scary to hear that, but we landed without issue. They told us we had two choices: the nice hotel with a shared room, or the lesser nice…

This is a fascinating story. Thanks for posting it.

That email you accidentally received really bothers me. I don't understand why a CS rep would get this invested to the point of wanting to cause you real harm. They're not the airline. The psychology is fascinating. There are people out there who feel like a mild short-term inconvenience to them where they have no stakes somehow justifies life-changing harm is kinda frightening, honestly.

I'm reminded of the Yahoo search data fiasco that was allegedly anonymized. Turns out, it wasn't so anonymous [1]. For one thing, people tend ed to search their home address. Whoops.

You mention writing style. We already have LLMs quite capable of copying a writing style. It's a natural extension to say we can fingerprint writing style too.

But here's another aspect. Imagine you're in a relationship with someone and you somehow fingerprint their personal data with a company. For example, you use their Netflix to like 5 very obscure movies, to the point where it's likely unique. Now imagine that Netflix's data gets released in an "anonymized" form and you can now find it based on those obscure likes. I can imagine many scenarios like this. And there's no text involved here at all.

[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/yahoos-gigantic-anonymized-u...

Post reply on HN