alt Hacker NewsThis 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...
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I don't understand why a CS rep would get this invested to the point of wanting to cause you real harm.
Two possibilities come to mind... 1 - The CS rep has been instructed to do this. Scary, but corporate leaders can be assholes and wield lots of power within their orgs, so doesn't seem completely unlikely to me.
2 - The CS was just a dick.
Frankly, given the behavior of various SuperMegaCorps over the past few decades, I'm going with #1.
> I don't understand why a CS rep would get this invested to the point of wanting to cause you real harm
This is the kind of power tripping that easily corrupts people, especially those who don't have much power outside of work. The US national security apparatus is vast and powerful. Many people get giddy at the thought of inflicting punishment on those who "deserve" it. Act rude to a fast food worker, and you get spit in your food. Lots of people cheer the worker who spit in the food of a customer who is merely rude, impatient, or demanding. Or is guilty of being a cop, politician, rich, etc.
I can easily imagine the kind of CS rep who would delight in putting a customer who didn't just go along with things and spoke up for themselves... thats 'rude' and 'disrespectful' to some. Police are the most notorious for this kind of petty "you will respect my authority" but it is in every industry.
HN / hacker culture celebrates this in the 'Bastard Operator from Hell' [0], the sysop who will ruin your work and life with their IT wizardry, no matter if you're an intern or CEO, if they do not feel respected. Or if you interrupt their gaming with your support call.
[0] https://www.alnet.org/bofh/Bastard.html