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Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

theregister.com

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

#131

Post by pm215 »

mynameyeff wrote: post #110
pm215 wrote: post #29

I see from the court PDF that the process here involves Spirit giving the data to a "Deidentification Agent" (a third party firm that Google selects and pays for) who is responsible for stripping out things that would link data to any particular person before passing the data on to Google. Is that a standard thing, such that everybody in this transaction would have said "yes, put in the usual clauses about deidentify…

That's interesting that the name of this 3rd party's company is anonymous.

You wouldn't want to hard-wire the deidentification company's name into the contract between Google and Spirit. Otherwise, if the deident-company happens to go bankrupt or otherwise be unable to do the work then you'd need to re-do the Google-Spirit contract, which would be a massive pain. And you don't want to make "we can sign this with Spirit now" be dependent on "we have first signed the deal with the deident-company". So I think it's reasonable that the contract says "one or more third parties acceptable to or designated by Buyer" rather than being specific here.

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

#132

Post by Larrikin »

jefftk wrote: post #36
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 think you might have missed the deidentification piece?

Even before LLMs there were multiple papers written about ways to to reidentify people with ML and other statistical analysis. It is probably now even more trivial especially if you are Google.

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

#133

Post by account42 »

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 sorry but such assurances are worthless without being explicit what was scrubbed and what is retained. An "anonymous" customer ID with a list of flights is very identifiable when you have other information about the trips someone has taken. PII is not a binary yes or no and even benign data can become a problem in aggregate.

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

#134

Post by ozlikethewizard »

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.

Surely all this will take is asking the trained LLM to deidentify it lol

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

#135

Post by account42 »

tiahura wrote: post #116
left-struck wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should corporations have the same rights and freedoms as human beings? I think this is a far more important question than do you believe in right or left economic policy. idc, I want you to know, do you think a human’s rights, especially many humans together, outweigh that of non living entities like large tech companies.

Because corporations are just a group of people.

So corporations can go to prison then? Or do you think some groups of people should get a free liability shield without any restrictions that come with it?

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

#136

Post by the_other »

tiahura wrote: post #116
left-struck wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should corporations have the same rights and freedoms as human beings? I think this is a far more important question than do you believe in right or left economic policy. idc, I want you to know, do you think a human’s rights, especially many humans together, outweigh that of non living entities like large tech companies.

Because corporations are just a group of people.

If it's "people all the way down", why do companies pay so much less tax?

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

#137

Post by ElProlactin »

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…

> But, this is the kind of information I'm worried about when a vendor sells my data

Don't worry. Spirit probably lost all of the emails from the customers (or they were devnulled) and 90% of the data is probably autoresponder messages promising the company would respond.

The other 10% was probably the meme collection of the executive management team.

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

#138

Post by andsoitis »

left-struck wrote: post #111
tiahura wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Why should corporations have the same rights and freedoms as human beings? I think this is a far more important question than do you believe in right or left economic policy. idc, I want you to know, do you think a human’s rights, especially many humans together, outweigh that of non living entities like large tech companies.

> Why should corporations have the same rights and freedoms as human beings?

They don’t.

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

#139

Post by account42 »

PaywallBuster wrote: post #24
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…

your personal site SSL cert expired 10 days ago btw

Suckers pay companies for expensive SSL monitoring products, smart people just post to HN.

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

#140

Post by 6DM »

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

Your comment reminded me of a funny interaction I had a week or so ago.

I got a call that started with the usual automated message, "This call is being recorded." After the person joined, I pushed the record button on my iPhone, "This call is being recorded."

They were surprised and asked why I'm recording.

I said, "You're recording, so I'm recording too."

The rep insisted that the company doesn't like this but that they will continue with the call anyway.

Anyway, I wish people took this stuff much more seriously. It always seems to boil down to, "I don't have anything to hide" type of conversations and I've never managed to convince anyone that privacy as a concept isn't about having something to hide.

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