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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

#31

Post by chii »

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”

> de-identified

De-identified but far from useless.

as an example, they can remove the names off these sales data, so you can't identify who purchased what items. However, the purchaser would be identified by some sort of number, and you would be able to extract information about purchasing habits, and aggregate these habits into usable information for advertising purposes (like targeting and profiling).

And that's before AI training for LLM purposes.

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

#32

Post by Razengan »

I would love it if there were services where I could let them see everything I do, including when I poo and wank, if they just directly paid me for it.

No I don't want to just use your enshittified service for free. Fucking pay me and watch me all you want :)

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

#33

Post by imglorp »

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.

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

#34

Post by phatfish »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #11
embedding-shape wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wouldn't be surprised if Gmail data has far more access restrictions internally at Google than this auction bought dump.

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

#36

Post by jefftk »

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…

I think you might have missed the deidentification piece?

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

#37

Post by TeMPOraL »

echelon wrote: post #26
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…

"This call is being recorded so that Gemini can decide which purge wave to assign you to. Obedient humans will be carried over for further cycles until no longer needed. If you are scheduled for termination this cycle a disposal representative will be with you shortly." I kid, but... It's probably the precursor to insurance denials and job screening. I got banned from r/technology a few weeks back for decrying tracki…

> I made the counter argument that watermarks would find their ways into everything and eventually be bound to attestation.

Yup.

Elsewhere in another front page thread today: "oh but apps blocking screenshots because of 'sensitive content' can be bypassed by taking a photo of your screen with another phone".

Any tech-savvy person with two brain cells reading this and that: "gee, I wonder if the same magic imperceptible watermark that survives multiple rounds of cropping and printing and scanning, that's used to tag AI-generated content, could also be used to tag sensitive data, or ads, or which app is rendering it on screen, and then the camera app could refuse photographing it...".

I don't know why people don't see that AI watermarks are DRM, and DRM is universal, and there are many clients...

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

#38

Post by reaperducer »

jefftk wrote: post #36
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…

I think you might have missed the deidentification piece?

No such animal.

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

#39

Post by junofan »

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…

Seems the answer is “no” to the first part of your question. From the filing:

> For example, one initial bid requested certain customer list information; however, by the first round of the Auction, the most competitive bidders had agreed to bid on an asset schedule that expressly excluded PII.

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

#40

Post by fileeditview »

jefftk wrote: post #36
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…

I think you might have missed the deidentification piece?

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?

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