About twenty years ago, I was taking a flight back from 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 hotel with no roommate. I chose the latter. When we go there, they said, "oops, sorry, short on rooms!" So I had a roommate.
Wandered around Manaus, took a skiff out on the Rio Negro. Saw pink river dolphins. A little boat approached us and a kid handed me a sloth, and then demanded I return it with a twenty dollar bill.
The airline got us another plane 24 hours later. Made it back to the US safely.
A few weeks later, the airline reached out and said "Here is $100 for your trouble."
I declined to take that offer. I had missed several business meetings that cost me actual money. I couldn't donate blood for years because I had been to the Amazon and was tagged a malaria risk.
During the many arguments with the airline I threatened to take them to small claims court.
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.
But, this is the kind of information I'm worried about when a vendor sells my data. 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? How do you wipe that?
elric 18 minutes ago [-]
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 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?
warkdarrior 2 minutes ago [-]
Manny retail industries already share lists of "troublesome" customers (trouble = anything from too many returns to lawsuit-happy to friendly fraud). Not sure this is a new concern..
PaywallBuster 21 minutes ago [-]
your personal site SSL cert expired 10 days ago btw
dwedge 13 minutes ago [-]
I love the irony of you checking them out for more information in response to a comment of them being worried about who reads their data. Nothing wrong with it, just make me chuckle
jefftk 10 minutes ago [-]
I think you might have missed the deidentification piece?
xrd 3 minutes ago [-]
Not trying to be snarky, and perhaps it wasn't well stated, but the last paragraph I said I'm concerned about identification via my writing style. If they have my emails, they would have my writing style. It doesn't have to be tied to PII there, they can cross reference it with my blog. I'm speculating because I read that you can identify people by a few sentences of their writing.
"Deidentification" seems really murky and imprecise at best.
fileeditview 4 minutes ago [-]
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?
reaperducer 5 minutes ago [-]
No such animal.
js2 41 minutes ago [-]
> 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 Responsys marketing application, and details of 11 million sales of in-flight Wi-Fi services.
> There’s also operational data in the trove, describing over 763,000 flights, five million crew pairings, more than 1.2 million fuel slips, and records describing purchases of 787,452 parts.
> Google has reportedly said it bought the data to improve its AI services.
Gives "this call is being recorded for training purposes" new meaning.
echelon 19 minutes ago [-]
"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 tracking in AI content. The community was piling on saying it was okay because it removed AI content or made it easy to spot. I made the counter argument that watermarks would find their ways into everything and eventually be bound to attestation. The mods didn't like that. (Yet another structural problem with the lack of p2p self-service town squares.)
The socials are training the next generations for broad acceptance.
TeMPOraL 5 minutes ago [-]
> 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...
ronbenton 32 minutes ago [-]
> 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”
chii 12 minutes ago [-]
> 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.
imglorp 11 minutes ago [-]
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.
blitzar 46 minutes ago [-]
The headline is a little on the nose. Nice try but it isnt going to hit the levels of "Headless body in topless bar".
isoprophlex 23 minutes ago [-]
a vegetarian dinosaur, called "the quick bandit", eats shoots and leaves! no idea where he got his name.
pm215 15 minutes ago [-]
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 deidentifying the data" and multiple firms offer this service, or is it something that they custom-specified for this "we want the data for AI" transaction?
(The PDF mentions "the standard for deidentification set forth under the California Consumer Privacy Act", which suggests this is all pretty well legislatively understood.)
peyton 5 minutes ago [-]
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.
Ekaros 31 minutes ago [-]
Anyone else somewhat weirded by current state of affairs that this sort of information is valuable enough to even bother selling... And that it actually happens... It feels like some societies are in really weird place.
greggoB 27 minutes ago [-]
I am very much weirder out by it, yeah. Seems some societies are just excessively desperate for some kind, any kind, of fuel for economic growth, to the point this is where attention is now. The term "post capitalism" being thrown around feels less ridiculous than it did in years gone past.
funny, spirit was the only big airline without a crash
steveBK123 46 minutes ago [-]
Maybe they are building a social credit score system
cmiles8 25 minutes ago [-]
“This call is being recorded for quality assurance, and to give us more assets to sell in bankruptcy.”
44 minutes ago [-]
Razengan 11 minutes ago [-]
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 :)
everyone 1 hours ago [-]
How the fuck is that even remotely legal? ... "deidentified" my ass.
embedding-shape 57 minutes ago [-]
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.
akoboldfrying 39 minutes ago [-]
I basically agree, but I'd also say: Every Gmail user has already accepted such a promise as sufficient.
phatfish 11 minutes ago [-]
I wouldn't be surprised if Gmail data has far more access restrictions internally at Google than this auction bought dump.
36 minutes ago [-]
sscaryterry 50 minutes ago [-]
Ah, trust me bro :)
noir_lord 35 minutes ago [-]
You know when we (they) tell you not to do any personal computing on work devices/systems and to keep your devices completely separate from work ones.
Yeah this (and lawsuits/investigations) are why, the employer owns the data, in some contexts (like this one) it can become an asset (or a liability) but in either case it's not yours.
Of course that only gets you part of the way there anyway see Twitch recently opting in all users by default to mined for AI and only adding an opt out after backlash with a quote that was so on the nose it made me stop "If we'd have asked them to opt in, they wouldn't have opted in" (paraphrasing but it was that blunt).
evek 10 minutes ago [-]
Tangental, but can’t wait for automated blackmail from crawlers continuously digging through my digital footprint. /s
Martha Wells hit it nicely in The Murderbot Diaries.
radres 45 minutes ago [-]
they wrote a shit article while trying to make some airline puns
stuaxo 37 minutes ago [-]
Woke up on the wrong side of the bed?
398642258909 33 minutes ago [-]
Each Register headline is worse than the last one.
19 minutes ago [-]
Rendered at 11:39:37 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
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 hotel with no roommate. I chose the latter. When we go there, they said, "oops, sorry, short on rooms!" So I had a roommate.
Wandered around Manaus, took a skiff out on the Rio Negro. Saw pink river dolphins. A little boat approached us and a kid handed me a sloth, and then demanded I return it with a twenty dollar bill.
The airline got us another plane 24 hours later. Made it back to the US safely.
A few weeks later, the airline reached out and said "Here is $100 for your trouble."
I declined to take that offer. I had missed several business meetings that cost me actual money. I couldn't donate blood for years because I had been to the Amazon and was tagged a malaria risk.
During the many arguments with the airline I threatened to take them to small claims court.
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.
But, this is the kind of information I'm worried about when a vendor sells my data. 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? How do you wipe that?
"Deidentification" seems really murky and imprecise at best.
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?
> There’s also operational data in the trove, describing over 763,000 flights, five million crew pairings, more than 1.2 million fuel slips, and records describing purchases of 787,452 parts.
> Google has reportedly said it bought the data to improve its AI services.
Gives "this call is being recorded for training purposes" new meaning.
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 tracking in AI content. The community was piling on saying it was okay because it removed AI content or made it easy to spot. I made the counter argument that watermarks would find their ways into everything and eventually be bound to attestation. The mods didn't like that. (Yet another structural problem with the lack of p2p self-service town squares.)
The socials are training the next generations for broad acceptance.
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...
I really doubt all this stuff was “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.
(The PDF mentions "the standard for deidentification set forth under the California Consumer Privacy Act", which suggests this is all pretty well legislatively understood.)
> 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.
https://s-1.vercel.app/
No I don't want to just use your enshittified service for free. Fucking pay me and watch me all you want :)
> 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.
Yeah this (and lawsuits/investigations) are why, the employer owns the data, in some contexts (like this one) it can become an asset (or a liability) but in either case it's not yours.
Of course that only gets you part of the way there anyway see Twitch recently opting in all users by default to mined for AI and only adding an opt out after backlash with a quote that was so on the nose it made me stop "If we'd have asked them to opt in, they wouldn't have opted in" (paraphrasing but it was that blunt).
Martha Wells hit it nicely in The Murderbot Diaries.