211–220 of 457 posts
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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-...
I wonder if the owners of YCombinator have sold all comments to Big Tech for A.I. training. And how long before Google and Microsoft add to their T&Cs that all your anonymized email will be used to train their A.I.?
I don’t know why any company would pay. It can’t be that difficult to scrape this site and they already did it indiscriminately for years, violating laws and taking down public libraries and other public resources with no regard for their impact.
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…
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 got a really strange response over email which I clearly wasn't supposed to see. A representative from that airline was asking internally if they could put me on the no-fly list. That was really chilling. What if they only pretended to forward it to you by mistake and you /were/ supposed to see it? As in "it would be a shame if you could never fly again".
Before you push back at your work you have to consider possible loss of work and therefore housing/medical insurance/food.
The entire US system is designed around baked in blackmail of the individual into conforming. Not surprising at all to see the airline turn the no fly list into that pressure, it's the main technique we know to motivate people in the USA.
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There's something about circles of control in this, that makes the difference. If I publish information about myself, that's about me, and it's in my control. If someone else shares information about me, without my consent, and someone uses that to nose in on me, that feels creepy and problematic.
If you find that concerning, I recommend asking Claude or Codex to analyze all your HN comments and build a profile of you (I recommend that to everyone, not trying to single you out btw.) It takes about 20 minutes. It was eye opening and somewhat unsettling how accurate it was when I ran it on my own data. Even worse, there’s NO way to delete your old HN comments.
https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMg_c00f7358-429f-4ff8-bd3f-5a...
I suppose it's the 2026 version of "Googling Yourself" and of course, could be used by any of us vs. any given forum account on HN or elsewhere.
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Reidentification via writing style is definitely possible, and I doubt the vendor will modify things in a way sufficient to handle that. But I think this is a place where we should apply bounded distrust: there are lots of places where we should distrust Google, but reidentifying people in an explicitly deidentified dataset isn't one of them.
Based on their trackrecord, That's definitely a concern. I don't really understand on which basis you conclude 'isn't one of them' . 'Don't be evil' ? :-P
For example, I think a pretty worrying outcome here is that deidentification is imperfect (not surprising), the data is fed into model training, and then the model makes identity-dependent inferences. Since no one tried to break deidentification, it's within what I'd expect from the company. (And, to be clear, is bad.)
On the other hand, intentional reidentification to work around contractual deidentification to "a sell a product to the airlines that offered to keep annoying people like me from purchasing flights" is the kind of thing that would make Google's lawyers terrified, so we should not expect it.
If you look at how this worked with DoubleClick, Fitbit, etc there were initially barriers to linking data but the mechanism for unlinking was updated agreements with people who had ongoing interaction with the continuing entity. That's not the situation with the Spirit data.
The closest I'd expect to see for a "keep annoying people from purchasing flights" situation is not a list of troublemakers but a model that's very good at scoring future communications from customers, and has learned to distinguish profitable vs unprofitable customers. This is well within what I'd expect from companies, and doesn't require any reidentification.
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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 northeas…
I'm sitting here chuckling because you felt the need to post this. Your points are valid. And there probably are plenty of Americans who needed the correction. But still.
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Ah, but Google promised to remove PII they found in this deidentified dataset, so worry not. > 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 to scrub any PII it finds in the trove.
I basically agree, but I'd also say: Every Gmail user has already accepted such a promise as sufficient.
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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…