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Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

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

#121

Post by DanielHB »

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…

Just to dispel some Brazil myths:

1) +95% of the population live on the coast very far away from the Amazon. Most of the population has not been there. Most of the coast has a very different jungle biome called Mata Atlantica and the countryside close to the coast is not that different from temperate forest of Europe. That is what most all Brazilians are used to. There is a significant population in the arid northeast though and the cold south as well (which is even more similar to europe).

2) Manaus is the biggest city in the Amazon and it is huge developed place (and has been for decades). You are not in the middle of the jungle if you land in the airport. The countryside around the city is jungle though.

3) Brazilian people do not necessarily like or are used to tacos and spicy food. Mexico is _really_ far away from Brazil.

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

#122

Post by sailfast »

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?

Not for nothing, but you have probably already consented. Typically user agreements allow for this kind of sale if you’ve authorized use and processing but YMMV.

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

#123

Post by palmotea »

anon373839 wrote: post #99
budman1 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

This. Training data companies like Mercor are even creating simulated companies to create similar data, so they can better automate even more white collar work:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/business/ai-white-collar-...:

> The data-training start-ups see a lucrative opportunity in recreating workplaces in miniature: controlled environments in which their gig workers can evaluate and reproduce emails, memos and slide presentations in context. The information emerging from such a setup, the companies boast, will help shrink the gap between what A.I. models can accomplish and what office workers actually do from one minute to the next, as ideas and instructions flow between meetings, documents and applications.

> Scale, for example, has said that “our environments replicate real-world workflows,” and that its contractors “curate artifacts that capture the complexity, ambiguity and edge cases of real professional work.”

> Executives see the models’ shortcomings as a sign there’s more for them to do.

> “I often use Claude Cowork, right?” said Edwin Chen, the founder of Surge. “And even though Claude Cowork is incredibly smart, oftentimes it doesn’t quite understand the nuance of Slack. It doesn’t quite understand this ambiguous question I have. It doesn’t quite understand where to go and find this Google document.”

> According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Mr. Chen’s stake in Surge — and his vision for what it could become — makes him the 258th-richest person in the world.

> “I often think about us as essentially, like, the school for A.G.I.,” Mr. Chen said, referring to a prophesied level of A.I. that surpasses human intelligence. “A.I. comes to us, and A.I. learns to run the world.” He and his customers at the big A.I. labs, he said, are designing the curriculum.

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

#124

Post by malfist »

limagnolia wrote: post #108
elric wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It is being scrutinized. The sale is overseen by the courts. Also, the media is scrutinizing. Also, PII has already been addressed by the court, from the article: "If you’ve flown Spirit and worry that Google will soon know about a testy conversation you had with the airline’s call center, you’re being told not to worry. The court filing says the data was deidentified before being put on sale and Google has promised…

I'm sure we can trust google to keep to their word and that we can trust a bankrupt airline to do their best at removing pii.

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

#125

Post by elric »

tiahura wrote: post #93
elric wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]

What a load of crap. Your liberty to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. What's "triggering" is when it hits my nose.

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

#126

Post by t_mahmood »

limagnolia wrote: post #108
elric wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It is being scrutinized. The sale is overseen by the courts. Also, the media is scrutinizing. Also, PII has already been addressed by the court, from the article: "If you’ve flown Spirit and worry that Google will soon know about a testy conversation you had with the airline’s call center, you’re being told not to worry. The court filing says the data was deidentified before being put on sale and Google has promised…

pinky promise?

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

#127

Post by elric »

malfist wrote: post #124
limagnolia wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is being scrutinized. The sale is overseen by the courts. Also, the media is scrutinizing. Also, PII has already been addressed by the court, from the article: "If you’ve flown Spirit and worry that Google will soon know about a testy conversation you had with the airline’s call center, you’re being told not to worry. The court filing says the data was deidentified before being put on sale and Google has promised…

I'm sure we can trust google to keep to their word and that we can trust a bankrupt airline to do their best at removing pii.

Yes, the same google that has repeatedly, entirely "by accident", captured boatloads of wifi data with their wardriving vehicles (or google streetview or whatever it's called). They sure seem like a trustworthy bunch.

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

#128

Post by tiahura »

VBprogrammer wrote: post #112
tiahura wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Mass automated data collection and automated analysis are probably the biggest threat to freedom in the present day.

Funny, when I watch the news I see freedom being taken away by authoritarians, not people tracking who complains about window seats, or what pizza place you like best.

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

#129

Post by jordanb »

limagnolia wrote: post #108
elric wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It is being scrutinized. The sale is overseen by the courts. Also, the media is scrutinizing. Also, PII has already been addressed by the court, from the article: "If you’ve flown Spirit and worry that Google will soon know about a testy conversation you had with the airline’s call center, you’re being told not to worry. The court filing says the data was deidentified before being put on sale and Google has promised…

"De-identified" data is trivially easy to re-identify, especially by google.

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/a-face-is-expo...

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

#130

Post by rileymat2 »

dgellow wrote: post #50
js2 wrote: post #10

> Google bought itself 100 million emails and 500 million items from Microsoft Teams, 17 million OneDrive files and 20.5 million items from SharePoint. The search giant also now owns over 30 million recorded customer service calls, and more than 15 million customer service chat records. 600,000 ServiceNow tickets are another element of the collection, along with 13.7 million active emails addresses from Oracle’s Resp…

Is there anything that can legally be done against this? It feels like a breach of consent. Like, it cannot be that when one accept their voice to be recorded for _human_ training they also accept it to be recorded for LLM training

Some aspects of privacy policies don't survive bankruptcy, I'd wager usage consent does not either. IANAL.
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