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elrictoday at 11:21 AM7 repliesview on HN

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?


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limagnoliatoday at 12:46 PM

It is being scrutinized. The sale is overseen by the courts. Also, the media is scrutinizing. Also, PII has already been addressed by the court, from the article: "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."

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Ekarostoday at 11:41 AM

Makes one appreciate living in place with sufficient constitutional protections against this sort of stuff. Even for work stuff selling this info wouldn't fly in some parts of the world.

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prependtoday at 1:53 PM

Since it’s work communications, consent was already given.

When you join a company, you typically sign an agreement that talks about how the company owns all your output. Thumbs upping a Teams message is work output and they own it.

Every email sent and received. Every keystroke. Etc etc etc.

If you don’t want your employer to log and sell it, start your own company. Or use a personal device. I do the latter.

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sailfasttoday at 12:54 PM

Not for nothing, but you have probably already consented. Typically user agreements allow for this kind of sale if you’ve authorized use and processing but YMMV.

warkdarriortoday at 11:43 AM

The party owning this data (Spirit Airlines) is consenting to the sale. Employees and customers of Spirit consented when they started employment and did business with Spirit, respectively.

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Tangurena2today at 2:00 PM

> How can such data be sold without the consent of all involved parties?

In the US, whoever owns the computer owns the data on it. Courts have routinely ruled that you have no say in what other people collect about you. The goal of bankruptcy courts is to minimize the losses of the creditors. And bankruptcy courts routinely rewrite contracts except where statute prevents it (like mortgages).

In the EU, you own the data about yourself. A lot of people utterly hate GDPR, but that's reason that you own the data about yourself.

tiahuratoday at 12:39 PM

[flagged]

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