Earlier quoted context omitted.
You probably should have taken the kid to small claims, that was extortion
Should have kept the sloth.
[deleted]
Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit
191–200 of 457 posts
Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I don't understand why a CS rep would get this invested to the point of wanting to cause you real harm. Two possibilities come to mind... 1 - The CS rep has been instructed to do this. Scary, but corporate leaders can be assholes and wield lots of power within their orgs, so doesn't seem completely unlikely to me. 2 - The CS was just a dick. Frankly, given the behavior of various SuperMegaCorps over the past few deca…
... or frustrated. "I have my quota of jiras to meet, and this person is taking up too much of my time when it was such a simple issue which no one complains about". Not a good customer service mindset, but frustration happens.
Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit
#193About 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?
> How can such data be sold without the consent of all involved parties?
In the US, whoever owns the computer owns the data on it. Courts have routinely ruled that you have no say in what other people collect about you. The goal of bankruptcy courts is to minimize the losses of the creditors. And bankruptcy courts routinely rewrite contracts except where statute prevents it (like mortgages).
In the EU, you own the data about yourself. A lot of people utterly hate GDPR, but that's reason that you own the data about yourself.
Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit
#194About 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 a reminder that about 40% of the email conversations in the last 20 years are already in Google’s possession with the identifying data. (About another 40% are in Microsoft’s.)
If they want to do that they already can, thanks to the public’s overwhelming appetite for “FREE” overriding every single other possible concern.
Which is funny to point out on a post about Spirit, since that was an airline built to serve the customers for whom cheapness was the overwhelming single concern.
Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit
#195It’s data - curious why they’re selling it only to one party (Google) vs. multiple buyers
Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit
#196Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why should corporations have the same rights and freedoms as human beings? They don’t.
Exactly. Corporations have more rights. Also immunity from any real consequences, but that's mostly an enforcement thing.
> Corporations have more rights. Also immunity from any real consequences
That's just untrue.
They may have rights that you do not like that they have, but they do not have MORE rights than humans.
Similarly, companies face all sorts of penalties and restrictions that constrain them in particular ways, including very severe penalties. There might be some actions that you think ought to have more severe penalties than they get, but that doesn't make your statement that companies are immune to real consequences false.
Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit
#197Earlier 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…
"De-identified" data is trivially easy to re-identify, especially by google. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/a-face-is-expo...
Specially when you have a list of flights, people on board, issues, etc... The fact that they are specifically tellling people to not worry about that is also a red flag for me. They know what they'd worry about if they were the affected ones.
Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would not be offended by the blood donation thing. They generalize based on administrative regions (Amazonas in this case) and not whether you visited a big developed city or not. I had a similar blood donation issue for visiting a particular island in the Philippines, and could not donate for 4 months.
It is funny there is no similar treatment about TBE (tick disease) which is predominantly an European disease and very dangerous and much more common than Malaria is in most (all?) South American countries... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick-borne_encephalitis
There is a vaccine available for TBE. I got it. It is expensive, and my insurance won't cover "travel vaccines".
https://www.cdc.gov/tick-borne-encephalitis/prevention/tick-...
Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit
#199Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I don't understand why a CS rep would get this invested to the point of wanting to cause you real harm. Two possibilities come to mind... 1 - The CS rep has been instructed to do this. Scary, but corporate leaders can be assholes and wield lots of power within their orgs, so doesn't seem completely unlikely to me. 2 - The CS was just a dick. Frankly, given the behavior of various SuperMegaCorps over the past few deca…
3- The CS rep tought that would make them more favourable to their manager.
Re: Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit
#200About 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 a reminder that about 40% of the email conversations in the last 20 years are already in Google’s possession with the identifying data. (About another 40% are in Microsoft’s.) If they want to do that they already can, thanks to the public’s overwhelming appetite for “FREE” overriding every single other possible concern. Which is funny to point out on a post about Spirit, since that was an airline built to serve…
> the public’s overwhelming appetite for “FREE”
In the early pioneering days of the commercialized Internet, email addresses were inextricably linked to your ISP. You paid for an ISP connection and you got an email box, with MTA and MUA service to match. You were reluctant to switch or leave your ISP, because that also meant leaving behind your email address. Of course, a minority of nerds got around this with their own domains, etc.
However, it seems that Google, AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail, and other players got into providing free email services and eventually grew into giants that supplanted every other MTA service. This was not an accident and it was not merely our appetite for “FREE” but it was a very calculated plan by the industry. Those early ISPs did not have a business model that admitted monetizing our private data; they seemed to have a more respectful attitude for keeping it private. Perhaps that was a result of being telecommunications-based companies, rather than advertising or entertainment.
If a service like email provides such endless treasure troves of personal data, including a social graph and glimpses into our private daily lives, why not provide it for free and monetize opportunistically on the data itself? The free email services killed the paid services, not by being better or cheaper, but by being bigger, centralized, and more persistent. The main reason I signed up for Yahoo! was because it would be an utterly stable presence. I saw my parents and others so hopelessly attached to an ISP-based email, but I couldn't end up like that.
After streaks of losing my home and non-payment of bills and moving around over decades, the most stable point of contact for me has been a "free" email address.