alt Hacker NewsGoogle buys crashed airline Spirit's data at auction, because AI
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> 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.
> 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 must be naive. I was under the impression Google wants this data to learn from a universally hated company's worst processes and practices, i.e. to teach their AI what not to do. It seems people are worried about their pii or that Google is curating a blacklist of customers?
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.
Is this the first case of a company's data being sold at bankruptcy for a significant sum? I'm genuinely unsure. Where there such value in this type of data before? Is every bankruptcy manager looking at this and seeing how every bankruptcy can now raise a few million more dollars?
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.)
Ive been thinking about data accumulated from all the out-of-business companies. Interesting to see data is being auctioned like an asset.
The headline is a little on the nose. Nice try but it isnt going to hit the levels of "Headless body in topless bar".
>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.*
Huff, what a relief!
So the AI service agent can be just as bad as Spirit's service was.
I wonder how they will use the data. If it was me I’d try to build a simulation of an airline, and then use it as an agent training environment. It really depends on the exact nature of the data what kinds of agents you could train, but maybe customer support (imo the worst AI use case) that are more empowered to make changes, or something for making more autonomous calls when recovering from irrops? Could be some cool’s stuff if a little niche, I hope they share / publish something and it doesn’t just disappear into a void.
> a huge trove of deidentified data
> 100 million emails
How does one deidentify 100 million emails?
This is scary. If you have a reddit account that ever links to another social media then Gemini knows every about you
Absolutely scary
The idea that they got an archive of my coworkers tickets that just say "its broke", is amusing.
So they didn't even have to build the torment nexus, they just bought it. Only bad can happen.
I can make them millions of emails and I'll charge them only $2 million not $10 million.
That title is a bit much. I get they’re going for “wordplay” but at first glance I thought they were buying the data from crashes flights…?
Data is the new petroleum
funny, spirit was the only big airline without a crash
I can’t help ask but what? They say it’s for training their models. On what? One of the most horribly run airlines to ever exist?
“This call is being recorded for quality assurance, and to give us more assets to sell in bankruptcy.”
Great - now spirit will be the “model”, could you pick a worse example?
How the fuck is that even remotely legal? ... "deidentified" my ass.
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 :)
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.
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they wrote a shit article while trying to make some airline puns
I wonder if the owners of YCombinator have sold all comments to Big Tech for A.I. training.
And how long before Google and Microsoft add to their T&Cs that all your anonymized email will be used to train their A.I.?
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 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?