alt Hacker NewsAbout 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?
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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 of 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?
Just to dispel some Brazil myths:
1) +95% of the population live on the coast very far away from the Amazon. Most of the population has not been there. Most of the coast has a very different jungle biome called Mata Atlantica and the countryside close to the coast is not that different from temperate forest of Europe. That is what most all Brazilians are used to. There is a significant population in the arid northeast though and the cold south as well (which is even more similar to europe).
2) Manaus is the biggest city in the Amazon and it is huge developed place (and has been for decades). You are not in the middle of the jungle if you land in the airport. The countryside around the city is jungle though.
3) Brazilian people do not necessarily like or are used to tacos and spicy food. Mexico is _really_ far away from Brazil.
That's exactly how it will go. Few controlling everything, and a slip might make you not able to live.
> 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?
The OP article is quite poor in terms of information provided, but the buyer (Google) had to explicitly agree not to attempt to re-identify users. https://www.axios.com/2026/08/17/google-spirit-airlines-bank...
I never understood this attitude, like I feel like being able to fly in airplane is one of the most amazing human achievements, yet people will try and save down to the dollar booking a flight like it was breakfast at Dennys, and come out huffing and puffing as soon as anything goes wrong demanding their money back. Airlines like Spirit catered to the worse of these type of customers.
So what happened to the sloth??? Don't bury the lead, man!
your personal site SSL cert expired 10 days ago btw
The article directly addresses this concern:
"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."
This is a fascinating story. Thanks for posting it.
That email you accidentally received really bothers me. I don't understand why a CS rep would get this invested to the point of wanting to cause you real harm. They're not the airline. The psychology is fascinating. There are people out there who feel like a mild short-term inconvenience to them where they have no stakes somehow justifies life-changing harm is kinda frightening, honestly.
I'm reminded of the Yahoo search data fiasco that was allegedly anonymized. Turns out, it wasn't so anonymous [1]. For one thing, people tend ed to search their home address. Whoops.
You mention writing style. We already have LLMs quite capable of copying a writing style. It's a natural extension to say we can fingerprint writing style too.
But here's another aspect. Imagine you're in a relationship with someone and you somehow fingerprint their personal data with a company. For example, you use their Netflix to like 5 very obscure movies, to the point where it's likely unique. Now imagine that Netflix's data gets released in an "anonymized" form and you can now find it based on those obscure likes. I can imagine many scenarios like this. And there's no text involved here at all.
[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/yahoos-gigantic-anonymized-u...
And this is why data protection laws, like the (imperfect) EU ones that are so lamented here on HN, are necessary.
> they could do that with that email chain
Now think about all the Gmail data Google has.
This is why I get bad vibes any time I hit a cloudflare interstitial page. If you ever piss them off it would be trivial to cut you off from most of the internet.
Well at least you didn't land in the middle of nowhere. Nokia had the worlds largest cell phone factory there back in the day.
Did you end up getting more than $100?
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..
> But, this is the kind of information I'm worried about when a vendor sells my data
Don't worry. Spirit probably lost all of the emails from the customers (or they were devnulled) and 90% of the data is probably autoresponder messages promising the company would respond.
The other 10% was probably the meme collection of the executive management team.
- if they could put me on the no-fly list. -
ahhh, there seems to be different no-fly lists? The one Im aware of is the one for terrorists and moneylaunderers, and usually they will not tell you who put you on that list :-D