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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?
"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."
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...
Now think about all the Gmail data Google has.
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...
If someone else shares information about me, without my consent, and someone uses that to nose in on me, that feels creepy and problematic.
"Deidentification" seems really murky and imprecise at best.
But I think this is a place where we should apply bounded distrust: there are lots of places where we should distrust Google, but reidentifying people in an explicitly deidentified dataset isn't one of them.
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?
Of course, takes a lot more effort than not doing proper deindetification in the first place but if they wanted to appear like caring about data privacy they still have enough data points to correlate the sets later on (and/or over time).
> 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.
90% of e-mails and Teams communications are inane. Polite banter, "thanks for taking care of that, I appreciate it" "please route the forms to Janet this week because Bill is on vacation" "unit will be un available until the parts come in" . I can't see the intrinsic fact value of this kind of communication without screening it. And after screening, the gold nuggets would be minimal.
(Something something we will add your distinctiveness to our own, you will be assimilated, ...)
(Hell, the fact that it's all from one org would make it a great dataset to have in the open for sociological studies. I bet that today, aided by LLMs to sift through it, you could use it to map how information flows through a large org - how incident on the floor travels through time and layers of management until it reaches the C-suite, what of it survives, how it gets reacted to, how the reactions flow down...)
I have a hunch what this is for. AI companies want to make bigger inroads into nontechnical work settings. But LLM progress outside of fields where verifiable rewards for RL post-training can be synthetically generated (coding, math) has been pretty flat. Buying years of operational data from a company like an airline could be used to reconstruct long-horizon task trajectories in areas like customer service or marketing.
3 years ago, the Wall Street journal covered a company trying to use AI to generate documents required for the approval of new nuclear reactor reactor designs, which sounds dangerous, until you get to the point where they'd cite 2 million pages as necessary for a typical application. [1] I don't need to explain why no individual or institution could read that, much less examine it in detail. I remember a rather funny question I found in a comment to that story - "How many pages of those 2 million could contain pornographic images before anyone notices?"
It's obvious why companies are so desperate for training data - a text generator of sufficient quality is more conductive to the growth of the nuclear industry than any scientific breakthrough in nuclear physics. (And of course, if you want to prevent the development of a nuclear reactor by your competitors, being able to produce millions of pages of high-quality objections will do the trick.)
And it's not just nuclear power. When it comes to stuff like building rail lines, apartments or power plants (both conventional and renewable), you'd find that the main bottleneck is the necessity to produce documents. And of course, many documents can be subject to judicial review - a process that consumes even more text.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsoft-targets-nuclear-to-pow...
I guess the appropriation "any sufficiently advanced stock market is indistinguishable from entertainment" doesn't quite stop at equating the trade floor with a casino. At some point, entertainment also becomes the modus operandi of corporations.
On real life data on operations of a real large company.
Internally, most big companies are probably just as big of a mess, if not worse. But you can't get that data easily.
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).
It should really make us appreciate living in a country where freedom is the default.
> 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.
… and even if someone can prove that they didn't, the only consequences will be a teeny-tiny slap on the wrists.
This kind of stuff needs to come with promises to pay the P in the PII big bucks if the I is indeed I.
No I don't want to just use your enshittified service for free. Fucking pay me and watch me all you want :)
Martha Wells hit it nicely in The Murderbot Diaries.
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.?