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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

#291

Post by mmooss »

robhlt wrote: post #224
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…

None of that customer data is included in the purchase. Page 18 of the linked court document is the source of these record counts, and on the right is a "Google's Data Purchase Request" column that lists all of this "Customer Behavior" data as "not included". The Register is not a serious publication and completely missed this. Other outlets reporting this story do not include the claim that customer data is included…

So what is included?

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

#292

Post by xoa »

missedthecue wrote: post #267
akersten wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose consider yourself lucky that you haven't yet been inconvenienced by an issue completely within the airline's control and been offered $50 in funny money even though you had to pay out of pocket for your dingy hotel and transport in/out of the airport at 11pm/6am the next morning. And no, they won't reimburse that, because you could have slept on the terminal floor for free I on the other hand will never und…

Because airlines don't -and can't- promise incident free travel. They promise to get you to your destination. They don't like engine problems and the domino effect that has on their routing any more than you do. Saying this as someone with over a million miles flown, I've seen the worst sides of airlines. But let's be real, their slim margins cannot support bonusing out every passenger with a sob story about getting…

>Because airlines don't -and can't- promise incident free travel.

That's a strawman of the request, not the request. The request is that, same as anything else in a proper Free Market, the price includes all costs and internalizes all direct risks. I'm paying $XYZ to be delivered from point A to point B on a given date with a ~roughly given time. I don't expect there to never ever be trouble, that's life. I do expect them to take care of all trouble however, as I am in their care. If they create a need for a hotel stay, then they should pay for that. If they lose luggage, they should pay for that. If they have to reroute, put me on another mode of transportation, or whatever, that should all be their problem. And if they can't deliver reasonably appropriate service they should partially or fully refund the purchase.

This is critical to a functioning market. If Airlines Alpha & Beta both have a incident rate of 0.5% but Airline Omega has an incident rate of 4%, what should happen is Omega has to compete or go out of business vs the other two (and then someone new comes in and gets the assets to try a different approach). Maybe they save enough money over that they can offer lower prices anyway, or have high enough quality or unique offerings elsewhere to charge a higher price, or accept even lower margins, or some combo. But what cannot be allowed is for them to externalize that onto the public, because then the prices are fraudulent and no longer comparable between competitors. The market can't respond if the pricing signal gets muted. Unsurprisingly lots of players would love to be able to advertise a lower price not through actually earning a lower price but just socializing costs, but that's not ok.

>But let's be real, their slim margins cannot support bonusing out every passenger with a sob story about getting delayed.

Horse baloney, margins have nothing to do with this. Every airlines can and should be held to the same standard, so it's just a universal cost same as jet fuel. They're all in the same boat so long as they perform the same. If some airlines have much higher failure rates then others, then yeah they're going to have to address that somehow and that's exactly how it should be! Normal adult businesses deal with this via prevention, insurance and buffers, it's simply a cost of doing honest business.

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

#293

Post by [deleted] »

robhlt wrote: post #224
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…

None of that customer data is included in the purchase. Page 18 of the linked court document is the source of these record counts, and on the right is a "Google's Data Purchase Request" column that lists all of this "Customer Behavior" data as "not included". The Register is not a serious publication and completely missed this. Other outlets reporting this story do not include the claim that customer data is included…

[deleted]

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

#294

Post by mmooss »

imglorp wrote: post #33
ronbenton wrote: post #17

> 600,000 ServiceNow tickets are another element of the collection, along with 13.7 million active emails addresses from Oracle’s Responsys marketing application, and details of 11 million sales of in-flight Wi-Fi services. I really doubt all this stuff was “de-identified”

I don't see how it's possible any more, when correlated against all the various other data sources. And a record that might be unidentifiable now might become unique with more correlated data sources.

All you need is gender, birthday, and zip code to uniquely identify ~85% of the Americans (per some study). There is far more data in these records, even before AI there were far more detailed marketing profiles of people, and with AI software, it's likely easy to use it to identify people at scale.

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

#295

Post by oofbey »

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…

They will definitely be selecting the lowest bidder for this. Or perhaps a more expensive bidder if they can find one whose proprietary scrubbing technology is “a half dozen regexes our intern thought up”.

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

#296

Post by john_strinlai »

wat10000 wrote: post #247
Scene_Cast2 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Explicitly trying to re-identify data that has been de-identified is typically a fireable offence at FAANG. Accidentally making a machine learning system that happens to (potentially) do it is a different matter.

Modern corporations have learned that the best way to do shady things is to make it very clear that such things are against policy and absolutely forbidden, and then to also make it very clear that breaking policy is the only way to actually get your job done. That way they still get all the benefits of doing shady stuff, and if it ever comes to light then they can fire some scapegoats and explain that this was again…

this isn't even a "modern corporations" thing, at least in my experience.

i remember ~25 years ago being on-call with a work truck. we were absolutely not allowed to speed, at all, ever. we also absolutely had to be at the customer's site within 45 minutes of being called.

guess how many of my sites were >45 minutes away when traveling the legal speed limit.

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

#297

Post by dopamean »

freeplay wrote: post #288
dopamean wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Agreed. Before I had finished reading, I honestly thought you declined the $100 because everything ended up alright, you got to see some dolphins, and have a cool story to tell.

Same. I really thought that was going to be the next sentence. Was honestly shocked when I kept reading. Such a strange attitude.

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

#298

Post by Godsend69 »

6DM wrote: post #140
dgellow wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[dead]

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

#299

Post by [deleted] »

mmooss wrote: post #291
robhlt wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that customer data is included in the purchase. Page 18 of the linked court document is the source of these record counts, and on the right is a "Google's Data Purchase Request" column that lists all of this "Customer Behavior" data as "not included". The Register is not a serious publication and completely missed this. Other outlets reporting this story do not include the claim that customer data is included…

So what is included?

[deleted]

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

#300

Post by usefulcat »

tacitusarc wrote: post #257
dopamean wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There is no amount of maintenance that can avoid all mechanical issues. Take bird strikes, for example.

Regarding "carry insurance": margins in the airline business are notoriously slim. They compete very heavily on cost, because the service they provide is a commodity (or close to it). Most airlines will probably not willingly add any extra costs that they don't have to, because that would put them at a disadvantage relative to their competitors.

For those passengers who are willing to pay extra to be reimbursed for delays or other inconveniences, there may be travel insurance that can provide that.

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