Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

431–440 of 457 posts

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

#431

Post by dyauspitr »

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…

This is insane entitlement. You sued them because you landed at an alternate airport in a country you were visiting.

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

#432

Post by digitalPhonix »

badestrand wrote: post #429
digitalPhonix wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on the SLA. Usually you negotiate an SLA to cover much more than a refund of the missed service targets (but with a fixed/known ahead of time cost for breaching the SLA).

"Usually"? How many of Amazon's AWS customers have a custom SLA with them, maybe 0.001%?

I would say even smaller; but more than 90% of those SLAs will have explicit remediation and compensation clauses, hence “usually” wrt. to negotiating an SLA.

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

#433

Post by efreak »

hn_submit wrote: post #212
Forgeties79 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Sure it can be scraped, but it's so much easier if you just get a single database with everything in it. These are companies flush with cash you know.

https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?p=bigquery-public-... No idea how to to date it is, but there's two different apis available (official and algolia) if you need to update it.

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

#434

Post by Itoldmyselfso »

hadlock wrote: post #362
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…

>Register is not a serious publication Do you have a source to back this up? The register has been covering IT since before most people here were born, and literally invented BOFH.

And the Daily mail was founded in the 1800s. Age of the publication doesn't in any way correlate with the factuality of the reporting.

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

#435

Post by maybewhenthesun »

jefftk wrote: post #216
maybewhenthesun wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think this is the kind of place where applying bounded distrust is critical: it's not whether we trust Google overall, it's about figuring out what sorts of statements we should expect to effectively bind companies and in what ways. 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-depend…

I don't think google will explicitly 'deintificate' the data and sell it 'deidentified'. It's more that that kinda data can't really be anonymized. And while I trust google to pay lipservice to the 'anonymizedness' , I don't trust them at all that they won't just feed all that data into their AI training as-is, letting the deidentification happen when someone writes a smart prompt for gemini. As long as they have plausible deniability they don't care.

I don't trust google to do anything out of goodness, they'll do anything they can get away with. Same as all the other big tech firms. Once a firm gets too big it stops having morals.

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

#436

Post by piva00 »

xp84 wrote: post #254
piva00 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tha…

No need for a nefarious plot, as usual with capitalism it just needs incentives. They will have the data, if at some point it's beneficial to Google to re-identify it then it will be done.

Do I believe they have incentives to do it now? No, as you point it out for their advertisement cash-cow they can already just rely on their own data (GMail, Search, Google Flights) but nothing stops them from the potential later on, the data is now theirs.

Likely its value is just to train LLMs but the funny thing about data is that you can always try to find ways to extract more value out of it. I'd prefer there was no possibility for that without requiring me to trust Google (or any corporation).

In an ideal world my data would be mine to control, not to be traded in deals among 3rd parties, it's valuable and I've spent time generating it so in a sense I've done free work to be extracted by these corpos.

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

#437

Post by crote »

badestrand wrote: post #428
ddj231 wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seems OP is not talking about compensation of the deal itself but rather compensation for the actual flight rather than a $100 voucher. Assuming his flight to Brazil was much more than that

Why should the entire flight be compensated? The airline provided the flight, just 24 hours later (and the delay is what the $100 are supposed to compensate).

Because the customer purchased a flight on a specific date, which was not delivered.

If you book a hotel room for 1-7 August to visit a conference, would you be okay if they said "oopsie, it'll be available for you 10-17 August, here's a $100 compensation"? What about a rental car, or food delivery? Is it okay for your wedding photographer to show up a day late? Of course not, the product you bought is inherently time-sensitive.

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

#438

Post by crote »

jbstack wrote: post #304
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?

I'll flip this around and say I've never understood why an airline is viewed as a special case. In the general case, if you enter into a contract and pay for a service, then don't receive that service, you're entitled to sue the service provider for your losses. For example, if I turn up to a hotel I booked only to find that the room isn't available, I'm entitled to sue the hotel for my cost in finding a reasonable l…

> In the general case, if you enter into a contract and pay for a service, then don't receive that service, you're entitled to sue the service provider for your losses.

This generally only applies to direct losses, though. If Amazon ships you a defective Bic pen, and it leaves you unable to sign a time-critical $1B contract, Amazon is only liable for the cost of the Bic pen - not the resulting $1B loss.

You might be able to sue for the cost of obtaining a replacement pen, but anything beyond that isn't going to happen without some kind of bespoke SLA.

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

#439

Post by tim333 »

badestrand wrote: post #428
ddj231 wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

seems OP is not talking about compensation of the deal itself but rather compensation for the actual flight rather than a $100 voucher. Assuming his flight to Brazil was much more than that

Why should the entire flight be compensated? The airline provided the flight, just 24 hours later (and the delay is what the $100 are supposed to compensate).

[dead]

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

#440

Post by midtake »

At least this has ostensibly a mission-driven purpose, to improve automated customer support.

When someone less scrupulous than Google starts buying up Snapchat and Kik and Roblox (and other such platforms) and piecing together social graphs with extracurricular activities that's when it will be a lot more dramatic.

Post reply on HN