21 comments

  • xrd 9 minutes ago

    About twenty years ago, I was taking a flight back from 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?

      PaywallBuster a minute ago

      your personal site SSL cert expired 10 days ago btw

  • js2 20 minutes ago

    > 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.

  • Taikhoom10 a minute ago

    Makes sense, from the amount you could learn from a strategy perspective.

    https://s-1.vercel.app/

  • ronbenton 11 minutes ago

    > 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”

  • blitzar 25 minutes ago

    The headline is a little on the nose. Nice try but it isnt going to hit the levels of "Headless body in topless bar".

      isoprophlex 2 minutes ago

      a vegetarian dinosaur, called "the quick bandit", eats shoots and leaves! no idea where he got his name.

  • Ekaros 10 minutes ago

    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.

      greggoB 6 minutes ago

      I am very much weirder out by it, yeah. Seems some societies are just excessively desperate for some kind, any kind, of fuel for economic growth, to the point this is where attention is now. The term "post capitalism" being thrown around feels less ridiculous than it did in years gone past.

  • sethammons 13 minutes ago

    So the AI service agent can be just as bad as Spirit's service was.

  • KORraN an hour ago
  • cmiles8 4 minutes ago

    “This call is being recorded for quality assurance, and to give us more assets to sell in bankruptcy.”

  • steveBK123 25 minutes ago

    Maybe they are building a social credit score system

  • 398642258909 12 minutes ago

    Each Register headline is worse than the last one.

  • everyone 42 minutes ago

    How the fuck is that even remotely legal? ... "deidentified" my ass.

      embedding-shape 36 minutes ago

      Ah, but Google promised to remove PII they found in this deidentified dataset, so worry not.

      > 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.

        akoboldfrying 19 minutes ago

        I basically agree, but I'd also say: Every Gmail user has already accepted such a promise as sufficient.

        sscaryterry 29 minutes ago

        Ah, trust me bro :)

      noir_lord 14 minutes ago

      You know when we (they) tell you not to do any personal computing on work devices/systems and to keep your devices completely separate from work ones.

      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).

  • radres 25 minutes ago

    they wrote a shit article while trying to make some airline puns

      stuaxo 16 minutes ago

      Woke up on the wrong side of the bed?