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Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

theregister.com

251–260 of 457 posts

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

#252
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why are Americans in particular expected to know details about every country on Earth? Do you think Canadians know all these facts about Brazil? Do Indians? Or Swedes? It's only Americans that are smugly called ignorant for not knowing about the entire world.

Because the US almost always scores behind its peer nations when its citizens are quizzed on generic geography.

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

#253
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…

FWIW the article says:

> deidentified data

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

#254
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to trust that this really "deidentifies". Time and time again it was shown, that the measures taken were not enough to anonymize. E.g. the parent wrote that he fears, he could be identified by his writing style, which is totally plausible. How would you "deidentify" this?

Even if they follow to the letter a deidentification process, Google and Meta have so much data about individuals that re-identification shouldn't be very hard for the majority of airline passengers' data they put their hands on. Of course, takes a lot more effort than not doing proper deindetification in the first place but if they wanted to appear like caring about data privacy they still have enough data points to…

The idea that there’s a nefarious plot to do something super evil with this data is a bit crackpot though based on their incentives.

Remember, Google = Ads. Their only focus and only care. Their mission statement, rendered accurately, is “Ads ads ads ads. Effective ads. Ads worth paying a lot for. Ads ads ads. Advertising and ads.”

If they choose to be evil in some additional way, (1) remember, they would only do that if in some way it serves their advertising needs — not to offer innovative new black-hat databroker services to airlines, and (2) this little dataset will not need to be re-identified. They’ll just use the 20 years of email and search data they already have on like half the world’s population.

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

#255
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'll never understand this attitude toward airlines. What did you want them to do in this situation? Keep flying the plane with engine issues so you could make your important meetings? It sounds like the airline did the right thing here but you were still mad?

A decent reimbursement.

Not parents fault the airline flies around with defective hardware.

Usually this is regulated by law.

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

#256
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…

That did not go where I thought it was going! I thought you were going to say that the pink dolphins, the sloth, etc, were all more valuable than $100 ever… nevermind you missed some meetings, time to sue!

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

#257
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'll never understand this attitude toward airlines. What did you want them to do in this situation? Keep flying the plane with engine issues so you could make your important meetings? It sounds like the airline did the right thing here but you were still mad?

Do proper maintenance so they don’t have engine issues, and carry insurance to compensate passengers in case they do?

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

#258
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'll never understand this attitude toward airlines. What did you want them to do in this situation? Keep flying the plane with engine issues so you could make your important meetings? It sounds like the airline did the right thing here but you were still mad?

Perhaps they want the airlines to do a better job maintaining their fleet such that the airline is capable of meeting its obligations with respect to arriving on time without crashing.

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

#259
post #50
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

I don't think there's any legal weight to the purpose of a recording unless you entered into a contract that has a clause to that effect. They have to tell you that the call is being recorded because of wiretapping laws. They stick "for training purposes" on there just to soften the language and reassure you that they have a good, non-nefarious reason to record. It doesn't actually limit what they're allowed to do with the recording.

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

#260
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'll never understand this attitude toward airlines. What did you want them to do in this situation? Keep flying the plane with engine issues so you could make your important meetings? It sounds like the airline did the right thing here but you were still mad?

Uhm, properly compensate passengers that have concrete harm to point to instead of offering a laughable alibi payment? What I'll never understand is why some neoliberal schools of thought defend conglomerates like they're their children... This company has enough money to compensate for fuck-ups, at least it should have. Every insurance on the planet can do the simple math involved for this risk assesment.
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