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?
Of course nobody is expecting that they "keep flying the plane with engine issues so you could make your important meetings". But ultimately you relied on them to get you to that meeting, and they failed to do so, so you should be compensated so that you're no worse off than if they had provided the service. The fact that an airline will sometimes fail to get their customers to their destination and will have to compensate them for it, is just the cost of doing business.
Luckily in the UK and the EU your right to compensation for delayed flights is enshrined in law.
Your entire point is completely at odds to reality. In the general case, contracts do not guarantee there are never problems, and problems happening do not create an automatic entitlement to sue. The entire point of contracts is to protect both parties.
Ultimately, if you are travelling, you are relying on *you* to get yourself there. Airlines and hotels will help, there's compensation available to some degree, but extrapolating that out to "everything is someone else's responsibility and I deserve to be compensated for everything I hoped to achieve" is pure fantasy.
If you book a hotel room for 1-7 August to visit a conference, would you be okay if they said "oopsie, it'll be available for you 10-17 August, here's a $100 compensation"? What about a rental car, or food delivery? Is it okay for your wedding photographer to show up a day late? Of course not, the product you bought is inherently time-sensitive.
You can absolutely find someone willing to sell you insurance on whatever you need for a price, but the airline isn't in the business of insuring the value of your meetings.
Do you think this is how companies sell things? With uncapped liability?
Do you think AWS reimburses customers for their lost revenue when they have an outage?
Yes, you have agreed to SLAs. Credit is issued on your bill if they slip away from the 99% uptime contract.
https://davidoks.blog/p/why-airlines-are-always-going-bankru...
I've had plenty of bad airline experiences and wished they gave me more for my trouble, but clearly they are unable to at current margins. If you want the market to provide a better service, it already does: you can pay tons more to fly private, either a charter or your own jet you purchased!
It's weird to see people simp for the airline industry. A cursory google search shows that United Airlines, to take one example, made $4,300,000,000 in profits before taxes last year. This is money that could easily be spent on things like better maintenance, more pilots and crew, and other expenditures that would make flights less apt to be delayed or canceled. Instead it goes to shareholders and executives.
https://www.united.com/en/us/newsroom/announcements/cision-1...
I wouldn't be surprised that an airline lost money in one of the worst travel years of all time (due to Covid).
Cursory searching shows United made more than $3,000,000,000 in 2024. So even if 2025 was an unusually good year for them, it wasn't a complete anomaly. Just goes to show that when flights get delayed due to insufficient available crew or maintenance issues, it's a savings that's passed on to investors and the c-suite at the expense of consumers.
Maybe you're not understanding what we're saying. There have been numerous comments remarking on flights that were delayed or canceled due to corporate decisions, which reduce to excess savings on (or insufficient investment in) maintenance and staffing. This has nothing to do with "better perks"!
Every dollar of profit is a dollar that could have been spent on maintenance and staffing, or god forbid, proactive investment in better systems and infrastructure. No one is saying that airlines should become non-profits. But I have a feeling three or four or five BILLION dollars in profits is too much.
My understanding is that a portion of net profits might go towards rewarding shareholders through buybacks (bolstering the stock price), but most of it is reinvested into the business, i.e. exactly what you are saying you wish they would do. A windfall enables them to purchase more aircraft and pay down debt accumulated in the years they do not make much in profit, of which there were many in recent history. Is it too much profit? I don't know, but they're spending over $7 billion in capital expenditures this year.
I'm not sure what to say to you wanting them to have better tech. I wrote code for a major shipping company over 2 decades ago, and it's impressive to me that airlines mishandle bags at a far lower rate (under half a percent) than UPS and Fedex which usually are around 3-5%. I'm not a logistics expert. Will things get better with robots or something? Time will tell.
Would you prefer I spend some time telling my personal horror stories? Or should I point out that while a meaningful minority of those profits have recently been going to buybacks (a billion or less) which do benefit shareholders and executives to some degree (although a lot of executive compensation is already paid before we're looking at net profits), most of those are going to the needs of the airline which operates in a very capital-intensive industry. They have do do things like, y'know, BUY AIRPLANES. A bit pricier than those MacBooks a typical SaaS is purchasing. Apparently, after the industry was deregulated, it made it very difficult to keep some routes stable, and the article calls into question whether you can actually have a free market ever reach equilibrium or if the strange nature of this particular industry will always be pushing one of the players towards bankruptcy.
Of course, you only performed a cursory look. Perhaps if you had put in a little effort, you'd realize you didn't just singlehandedly fix the airline industry!
That link I shared was not some random, cursory look at the biz. I felt I learned a lot from it. I'm not able to verify whether the conclusions are accurate, but if they are, it sounds like the business has some pretty unusual problems, and where to go from here is not at all clear.
By this logic, should I be able to sue Brooks Brothers for lost earnings if I split my pants in the middle of a sales pitch? Goodyear if I blow a tire on the way to a job interview? Taco Bell if I crap my pants in the middle of Jeopardy?
No. We insure ourselves against unforeseen events whose effects are financially unbearable to us otherwise. You've conveniently carved out certain unforeseen events in order to serve your point rather than being intellectually honest.
Businesses insure themselves against the death of an important employee, for example. If that employee is murdered, that is neither an act of nature, an accident, nor thievery.
You might argue "you were robbed of an employee" and stretch the meaning of the word "thief" but then I'd say a similar stretching of "act of nature [or] accident" includes "aircraft malfunction"
Businesses also insure against a great many other things.
I was referring to the case when an engine went bad and company had to use intermediate airport and accomodate all users for the night. Also you wouldn't want to punish company hard for admiting technical issues, since that might cause them to underreport and create dangerous situations.
You can sue anyone for anything. But when a service provider can't provide service because of acts of god, accidents, safety issues, or equipment failure, that's just... reality. Courts are not going to give you a huge payout because Delta refused to fly you in a broken plane to make your meeting. This is why insurance is a thing.
FWIW I think we should have the same laws in the US that you all have in the UK and EU.
This generally only applies to direct losses, though. If Amazon ships you a defective Bic pen, and it leaves you unable to sign a time-critical $1B contract, Amazon is only liable for the cost of the Bic pen - not the resulting $1B loss.
You might be able to sue for the cost of obtaining a replacement pen, but anything beyond that isn't going to happen without some kind of bespoke SLA.
If you take a taxi to a meeting and the taxi broke down so you missed some important meeting, should the taxi driver / company compensate you for that too? Or do they just refund you the fare, or pay for a different taxi?
I don't think that's reasonable. If you have a lot to lose then extra insurance should be a premium offering.
I on the other hand will never understand anyone extending any grace to an airline. They are constantly testing just how poor of an experience they can deliver to their customers and stay in business.
For starters, they could have offered more than $100 to OP here
Critically they promise "by a certain time" as well. Surely with so many miles you are aware of the "significant disruption to my travel plans" aspect to getting compensated for a service that they failed to deliver.
Plane crews timing out on the tarmac at midnight forcing everyone aboard to lose a day of travel is not a "sob story" it is a systemic and purposeful optimization on the airline's part, a gamble that they can put up enough customer service phone menus and hoops that they only have to comp a small portion of customers whose time and money they've misappropriated.
ETA: my example above is to point out that even in the common failure cases airlines are awful, and as OP shares, even worse in the rare engine failure case. Yeah, they don't directly control that the engine failed (unless we start talking about how lack of maintenance and overworked mechanics contribute to that, which we should, and is under their control btw) but a hundred bucks for being stranded in the jungle is an insult no matter how you slice it
It would kinda surprise me if that’s true. There’s an enormous difference in cost to provide a best effort, usually fine service, and a contract to get you there by a deadline. I could be mistaken but I bet there is no such promise.
Travel insurance is can be purchased for situations where a delay or canceled flight would create unusual costs for the traveler.
Better call your AI company for a refund. That my friend was an hallucination and you've been promised no such thing.
That's a strawman of the request, not the request. The request is that, same as anything else in a proper Free Market, the price includes all costs and internalizes all direct risks. I'm paying $XYZ to be delivered from point A to point B on a given date with a ~roughly given time. I don't expect there to never ever be trouble, that's life. I do expect them to take care of all trouble however, as I am in their care. If they create a need for a hotel stay, then they should pay for that. If they lose luggage, they should pay for that. If they have to reroute, put me on another mode of transportation, or whatever, that should all be their problem. And if they can't deliver reasonably appropriate service they should partially or fully refund the purchase.
This is critical to a functioning market. If Airlines Alpha & Beta both have a incident rate of 0.5% but Airline Omega has an incident rate of 4%, what should happen is Omega has to compete or go out of business vs the other two (and then someone new comes in and gets the assets to try a different approach). Maybe they save enough money over that they can offer lower prices anyway, or have high enough quality or unique offerings elsewhere to charge a higher price, or accept even lower margins, or some combo. But what cannot be allowed is for them to externalize that onto the public, because then the prices are fraudulent and no longer comparable between competitors. The market can't respond if the pricing signal gets muted. Unsurprisingly lots of players would love to be able to advertise a lower price not through actually earning a lower price but just socializing costs, but that's not ok.
>But let's be real, their slim margins cannot support bonusing out every passenger with a sob story about getting delayed.
Horse baloney, margins have nothing to do with this. Every airlines can and should be held to the same standard, so it's just a universal cost same as jet fuel. They're all in the same boat so long as they perform the same. If some airlines have much higher failure rates then others, then yeah they're going to have to address that somehow and that's exactly how it should be! Normal adult businesses deal with this via prevention, insurance and buffers, it's simply a cost of doing honest business.
However, your airline ticket alone is not that. It’s just a contract to carry you from point A to point B, and that will happen at a scheduled time if everything goes well.
Everything else that you infer should be in the service contract is a fantasy. It is simply not part of the product. You can go ahead and read the contract for yourself, every airline posts them.
Furthermore, there are basically no product categories that include all possible costs and internalizes all risks. Every single thing you buy has some kind of risk involved.
If I buy a ticket to a broadway show, they can refund me or give me a makeup date if there is an unexpected cancellation, but they will not reimburse all my costs of being in town on that day or compensate me for not having anything else fun to do with my time. They don’t know or care if I traveled across town or across the world to see that event. It’s not their financial responsibility if I blew $2,000 flying to NYC from some far away country to see their event.
When I pay my electricity bill including the flat delivery charges, my utility doesn’t guarantee that power will be uninterrupted and they don’t compensate me for outages. Even if they do compensate me for outages, they don’t compensate me based on the specific amount of disruption it caused in my life. I don’t get to tell the utility company “I work from home as a lawyer and this outage cost me $500/hour” and magically get that amount compensated to me.
If my local baseball game gets rained out and the game is made up another game, it’s not the team’s responsibility if I’m no longer in town or can’t make the new time. They even sell insurance for this very possibility when you buy group suite tickets. If you don’t buy the insurance you are SOL during a rain-out.
You can’t even really buy a consumer product and expect it to be problem-free for very much time. When you buy a car there’s no guarantee that there will be a set cost of maintenance or that unexpected problems will not occur, there’s only a highly limited warranty to cover manufacturing defects. Warranty length and coverage varies widely by manufacturer.
Numerous products are sold with no refund possibility of any kind. Just try to get a refund from your local McDonald’s franchise. They’ll never do it. They will give you replacement food, but they will never give you your money back.
Software has no warranty. At all. Period. Not even enterprise software. At best you get a service agreement where you get some kind of pittance of a reimbursement when something goes wrong.
And that's wrong. Same as warranties on products being far, far below reasonably expected working lifetime but with the option to have an added warranty. That sort of behavior is very common in our society at this point, but it's all bad.
>You just have to pay for the real cost of that service.
Ie, you just have to except the airlines externalizing that onto society right now. Doesn't mean we can't advocate for a free market instead though.
>Everything else that you infer should be in the service contract is a fantasy. It is simply not part of the product. You can go ahead and read the contract for yourself, every airline posts them.
You are demonstrating incredibly muddled thinking here, as well as leaping into your own brand new strawmen. Saying how things "should" be by definition is not saying how they are. I argued specifically against a strawman and incorrect point, and I said that it was a "request", I never claimed the contracts were secret or didn't have all sorts of BS escape clauses that, in many jurisdictions (though not so much in the EU), are unfortunately legal.
>If I buy a ticket to a broadway show, they can refund me or give me a makeup date if there is an unexpected cancellation, but they will not reimburse all my costs of being in town on that day or compensate me for not having anything else fun to do with my time.
The broadway show doesn't involve taking physical control over your physical body in time and space. You cannot just step out and leave partway through a flight. That you'd use this as an example is either stupid or malicious.
>When I pay my electricity bill including the flat delivery charges, my utility doesn’t guarantee that power will be uninterrupted and they don’t compensate me for outages
Your utility is massively regulated and depending on jurisdiction yes, they will indeed pay for certain levels of issues, as PG&E has been discovering in California over the last few decades. You don't pay for power not delivered, you are allowed to generate your own power and store it. There are SLAs available for utility services as well.
>You can’t even really buy a consumer product and expect it to be problem-free for very much time
>Numerous products are sold with no refund possibility of any kind. Just try to get a refund from your local McDonald’s franchise. They’ll never do it. They will give you replacement food, but they will never give you your money back.
Which, again, is bad, not good as you are arguing. That bad stuff exists elsewhere does not in fact mean we can't want to improve where possible incrementally.
Yes, we live in society the whole time, and no doubt you are very smart.
I would be in agreement with you that more customer protections are usually a good thing and that most jurisdictions on this planet really don’t have enough of them. Certainly I would agree that airlines shouldn’t be allowed to engage in as many anti-consumer games as they play in the status quo.
That said, I think we can both understand that there has to be a limit at some point to the risk internalization that a business can be reasonably expected to bear just to exist and sell products. Otherwise, it pushes costs higher for everyone and makes competition more difficult to come by.
It also limits product choice because many consumers prefer to choose higher risk options specifically to save on cost.
If airlines have to charge 10% more now because they have to compensate everyone’s hotel, car rental, and wasted DisneyWorld tickets for every canceled/delayed flight (I’m not saying you are advocating for such a thing, just a hypothetical), and I’m a customer who has a flexible schedule and never utilizes those compensations, now I’m just paying 10% more to get no additional protection for me personally.
This concept is essentially imposing a risk tax on all of society to normalize risks, and it might be argued that such a tax is not very progressive or productive.
Regardless of where we decided to specifically draw the line, any increase in compensatory duties imposed on airlines will increase pricing for their services. The airline industry is the perfect case study for that idea because it’s essentially a zero-margin business. Almost every US airline loses money flying and makes up for those losses with credit card programs. So if they have to start compensating for more scenarios, our ticket prices are going up, guaranteed. It’s not like Apple where imposing mandatory replaceable batteries or a 2 year warranty would barely change the economics of their business and greatly benefit consumers.
My main idea was not to bring up a bunch of irrelevant strawman examples, they were more to point out the fact that acceptable harm or risk is something of a universal concept in commerce. It’s not reasonable to ask beer companies to pay for every health complication of alcoholics just like it’s not reasonable to ask airlines to pay for every consequence of a delayed flight. This is because the level of risk was already agreed to by society: everyone knows that beer is bad for your health[1] just like everyone knows flights sometimes get delayed or canceled.
[1] The only reason the tobacco industry got into legal trouble is because they lied about their knowledge of its unhealthiness and addictive qualities.
Contrast this to airlines. They have ZERO incentives to delay your flight. They have zero incentive to divert passengers to another airport. They have no incentive to cancel, or otherwise prevent their plane from getting to its destination. Their interests are fully aligned with yours in this regard.
It's actually pretty simple to understand how I offer them grace, it's because they're terrible businesses with terrible financials. Airlines run on brutally thin margins, barely 5% in the best of years and usually closer to 1-3% in average years, and frequently wipe themselves out, as Spirit did here. They generally make less than 10 USD in profit per customer.
Because I don't want to pay an extra 100 USD for a marginally nicer experience, and w neither does anyone else. I want the cheapest possible way to be thrown through the air across an ocean. I'm not going to fault them for acting like assholes when I pay them like an asshole.
I'm curious what the game theoretic optimal here is.
But then corporates go brainwashing on tv that too much regulations are killing business.
You can have rights or ease of business, nailing both, sounds difficult.
I think that in the EU, compensation for such an event is at least 600€, plus all expenses paid (including meals, hotel, etc...). The airline most likely offered $100 as an attempt to settle for way less than what they legally owe.
Without further information, we can't really blame the company for the incident itself, and they may have had no other option regarding what happened in Manaus, but they definitely had the option of offering proper compensation instead of threats.
Everything else IMO is just fine. The airline landed the plane safely, made some promises (including a single room), could not keep all of those promises, the passenger pushed for more compensation than what airline offered, etc. That happens thousands of times every day all over the world. But this does not remove the big black mark of exploring putting a passenger on a no-fly list. My 2c.
Going to court is the standard, and usually the only, path for resolving disagreements that parties cannot easily resolve between themselves. Retaliating by putting the passenger on a no fly list deserves public shaming and pushback.
For example, a major grocery store can put people on a "do not come here again" list. But this is an easy way for a big business to hurt a person and should not be used for minor issues. I might see this "the business bans whoever it wants for any reason" as a legitimate defense, but not in a regulated business with high barrier to entry.
This is the kind of attitude that puts pressure on airlines and thus pilots to fly even when situation is dubious.
Everything done to and in an airplane is recorded, there are standard procedures for emergency situations, which pilots are expected to follow, and if the pilot didn't, he needs a really good reason, and avoiding passengers suing the company for compensation is not a good reason. We may be taking criminal charges here, this is one of the few cases where high ranking officials can go to prison, in addition to fines big enough to bankrupt the company. This is serious business, and the reason why aviation is so safe despite the risks inherent to flying.
Safety, and in particular compliance with safety regulations is non-negotiable. And you will notice that even the shittiest airlines (including Spirit) have a safety record on par with the best. It is just too risky to try to save money here.
They can carry insurance or spend the correct amount on maintenance so this doesn't happen.
And just for your information, since you seem to be oblivious, perfectly maintained equipment can still have issues.
And whether the company owes you anything depends on the jurisdictions involved, in US you ain't entitled to much.
Don't skimp on maintenance, make sure you have planes that can do divert in time.
If there was engine troubles in the middle of the ocean would it still be okay?
Insane bruv
Regarding "carry insurance": margins in the airline business are notoriously slim. They compete very heavily on cost, because the service they provide is a commodity (or close to it). Most airlines will probably not willingly add any extra costs that they don't have to, because that would put them at a disadvantage relative to their competitors.
For those passengers who are willing to pay extra to be reimbursed for delays or other inconveniences, there may be travel insurance that can provide that.
This is true, but not relevant here?
If you pay for a service, and you don't get that service, are you implying that you should just be SOL?
If the plane has an issue, and the pilot rightfully lands it for safety concerns, but the paying passengers don't get where they are going, that sounds like the airline's problem to me, not the passengers' problem.
At the very minimum the passenger should be refunded for their ticket, because they didn't get what they paid for.
There are already too many negative consequences in the world of commercial transactions that the end-consumer gets saddled with simply because they don't have the leverage, money or time to fight for redress.
Not parents fault the airline flies around with defective hardware.
Usually this is regulated by law.
What if they only pretended to forward it to you by mistake and you /were/ supposed to see it?
As in "it would be a shame if you could never fly again".
It is clearly a threat, and most likely a bluff. But should it be brought to court, they could claim it was indeed internal communication (and that you should feel bad for reading it in the first place). There may even be an internal response saying "no you can't be put on the no-fly list", which isn't forwarded to you of course, to keep up with the masquerade.
Before you push back at your work you have to consider possible loss of work and therefore housing/medical insurance/food.
The entire US system is designed around baked in blackmail of the individual into conforming. Not surprising at all to see the airline turn the no fly list into that pressure, it's the main technique we know to motivate people in the USA.
It's not just that lawyers are expensive and court is risky. Court also takes fucking forever. Somewhere along the way, a right to a speedy trial has been lost. People have jobs they have to get back to, families they have to provide for. The plea deal is often a way out right now, with the tradeoff of having a conviction.
Even if you're 100% innocent, it's often the better financial choice to just... take a guilty plea. The end result is we can't really say, for sure, how many convictions are actually guilty people.
The calculus gets even more complicated when we consider race. If you're a large black man, are you really going to want to take the chance in trial? If you're a meek white woman, you might be more inclined.
It's Adams defending British solders, and later being very much a supporter of the concept of jury nullification. The fact that the modern court has been allowed to not only block the distribution of this information, but actively seeks to tell jurors that they HAVE to follow the law is, to be blunt, a disgrace.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_boxes_of_liberty
No more of this nonsense around "arbitration" being OK. Take it all to court, force it to be on the public record.
Back when I still argued with people on reddit I was shocked to learn that normies actually believe this is a good thing. Particular example was that the fact that so much of your life is tied to your workplace and you can get fired for political activity outside of your work. This shuts down any non-mainstream discussions. They were like "yes this is exactly what we want".
When I tried to explain "ok but there were times when racism and homophobia were the mainstream, do you think people advocating for equality should've lost their jobs for their political activity" I always got in response 502 Internal Server Error.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/a-face-is-expo...
1. Google could do it.
2. <This space is intentionally left blank>
3. Therefore, Google is doing it!
(Step 2 needs to be filled in a bit for it to be a good argument. Generally, analogies don't quite make the cut.)
Please replace 'Google' with 'Profit-driven legal entity in the USA' and reread your argument.
The parent is making an assumption, based on past experience, but is also Most Likely correct.
I don't know exactly what gets sent to google, but it's certainly enough to identify and track (retrospectively) a huge part of the world's population.
Now I know you get tracked by the celltowers anyway, but still. Navigation works fine with the accuracy offered by just using GPS and it doesn't need all the wifi scanning, it's pure data harvesting.
However, you can increase gps accuracy using wifi. GPS is not that precise (part of which is government regulations) and WiFi does help immensely with accuracy.
The difference used to be larger, but with the multitude of satellite systems now available and the advancements in receivers the difference is way less than it used to be.
Yes, but theGoog doesn't own that data. By having all of theGoogOS devices scanning and reporting back directly to theGoog, theGoog gets that data for free. Plus, all of the other info it can hoover up that the cell towers would not have access.
You can argue that its a bad deal, shouldn't be allowed period, etc. But that is a different argument than saying that there is no scrutiny.
Even as an investor who stands to benefit from that monetization in the short term, I stand against this trend because like any Tragedy of The Commons economic scenario, in the long term (which isn't that long due to the automation that harvests this resource) it sows the seeds of its own dilution into functionally near non-commercial value.
Sure 50 M or even 1 B might be peanuts for faang but still there is real progress.
Support Noyb at all costs
Which is, of course, ridiculous, and follows the trend of absurdist contract law wrangling in corporations. Similar to non-competes and NDAs.
It makes sense to some degree, but the fact that semi-private conversations are included in that makes no sense. These have little to no business purpose.
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.
Of course if it's shared communication media (e.g. a mailing list) it can, but not at your private address, no matte if it's @company.com, it's considered the same as your private email.
> Italian Supreme Court case law according to which defensive controls may be carried out where there is a well-founded suspicion of unlawful conduct, provided that an appropriate balance is struck between the employer’s interests and the employee’s dignity and privacy, and that the control concerns data acquired after the suspicion arose.
It's like saying I consent to my phone company's 200 page long terms and conditions.
Corporate America has a very fucked up definition of consent, and they seem to have spread that definition broadly.
I disagree with this and think it’s a bad thing. If I founded a company, I would explicitly disallow this and make communications private and not resellable.
But it exists, sadly.
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.
My very first project at Google made them about $180M. It was canceled after about 3 years because it didn't move the needle. If it doesn't make at least a billion, it's not worth the distraction to the executives. I was like "Well can I quit and buy it back, I would love to make $180M", but no, it was too tied in to Google infrastructure to make a clean split, and would cost more in lawyers and exec attention to be worth it.
Most likely Google is using this so that they have actual training data on how a company runs internally. What kind of emails do people send? What actions are taken in response to them? What starts out as a chat and then becomes an email? What do communication architectures inside the company look like? Whose job is superfluous and doesn't actually add to the bottom line? Who does the same thing over and over again, which can be replaced by a computer and LLM?
They can then build this into the next release of Gemini and bundle it with their Cloud offerings, where it will generate much more than a billion dollars in sales to all sorts of organizations, without anyone much caring about the individual people who make up the data set.
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...
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.
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.
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...
> Facebook has been fined €110m (£94m) by the EU for providing misleading information about its 2014 takeover of WhatsApp. (...) When Facebook took over the WhatsApp messaging service in 2014, it told the commission it would not be able to match user accounts on both platforms, but went on to do exactly that.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/18/facebook-fi...
These are the kinds of scary scenarios that people should fight and push back on opaque, unaccountable laws that other people and organisations in power try to enact in the name of safety and security, and we need to collectively fight back when someone is charged, or worse "taken away", without due process and visibility.
The story really didn't go the way I expected.
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.
I had a similar blood donation issue for visiting a particular island in the Philippines, and could not donate for 4 months.
https://www.cdc.gov/tick-borne-encephalitis/prevention/tick-...
Your points are valid. And there probably are plenty of Americans who needed the correction. But still.
My grandparents came to Brazil right after WW1 way before the Nazis came to power. High ranking Nazis fled to south america because there were a lot of germans living there already. Nearly all german people who moved to south america did it way before WW2.
I just run into this stuff a lot living in Europe.
> I have a german last name, do you know how often people outside Brazil act weird when they learn I am Brazilian?
(Which is to be expected, proximity and all)
Do you think Canadians know all these facts about Brazil? Do Indians? Or Swedes? It's only Americans that are smugly called ignorant for not knowing about the entire world.
https://blog.education.nationalgeographic.org/2015/10/22/why...
Beware, unless that's what was intended.
Incidentally, only 54% of the Brazilian population lives within 150km of the coast. https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1bk6x0d/according_...
RTFP?
They may look cute and docile, but also have a panic reflex to grab onto the nearest tree-like thing they can feel with their claws, including their would-be attacker. Or if they just feel like they’re about to fall off their “tree” since they have horrible eyesight and get confused easily.
Which then leads to a cycle of pain and violence as they just dig-in harder and harder while trying to free them and/or fling them around wildly due to the human's “get this thing off me” response to sharp claws digging into their flesh.
There are some painful-to-watch videos on YouTube of this phenomenon from unsuspecting passersby tying to “help” them off the road/beach/etc and ultimately making things worse for everyone involved.
If someone else shares information about me, without my consent, and someone uses that to nose in on me, that feels creepy and problematic.
https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtMg_c00f7358-429f-4ff8-bd3f-5a...
I suppose it's the 2026 version of "Googling Yourself" and of course, could be used by any of us vs. any given forum account on HN or elsewhere.
Stylometry obfuscation is a surprisingly strong point in favor of using wholly LLM generated writing to rephrase your points. If someone sees a — and doesn't know you're intentionally trying to snuggle good points through blandly mellifluous prose, they'll just assume you're like every other boring dangerous professional out there. Nothing to worry about.
Surely if this is the scenario you're worrying about, and you accept the lack of regulatory protections, Google buying Spirit's data is a good thing, right? Much better them than the airlines who you already know to be corrupt?
To be clear, I hate airlines. It's one of the sectors that has certainly gone back down in terms of user experience. I have had shitty experiences, but also experiences where they surprised me with service. Those latter experiences were actually based on the credit card now that I think about it. On the plus side a lot more people get to fly now.
I agree with your very last concern about data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manaus
It's a major city.
If they want to do that they already can, thanks to the public’s overwhelming appetite for “FREE” overriding every single other possible concern.
Which is funny to point out on a post about Spirit, since that was an airline built to serve the customers for whom cheapness was the overwhelming single concern.
In the early pioneering days of the commercialized Internet, email addresses were inextricably linked to your ISP. You paid for an ISP connection and you got an email box, with MTA and MUA service to match. You were reluctant to switch or leave your ISP, because that also meant leaving behind your email address. Of course, a minority of nerds got around this with their own domains, etc.
However, it seems that Google, AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail, and other players got into providing free email services and eventually grew into giants that supplanted every other MTA service. This was not an accident and it was not merely our appetite for “FREE” but it was a very calculated plan by the industry. Those early ISPs did not have a business model that admitted monetizing our private data; they seemed to have a more respectful attitude for keeping it private. Perhaps that was a result of being telecommunications-based companies, rather than advertising or entertainment.
If a service like email provides such endless treasure troves of personal data, including a social graph and glimpses into our private daily lives, why not provide it for free and monetize opportunistically on the data itself? The free email services killed the paid services, not by being better or cheaper, but by being bigger, centralized, and more persistent. The main reason I signed up for Yahoo! was because it would be an utterly stable presence. I saw my parents and others so hopelessly attached to an ISP-based email, but I couldn't end up like that.
After streaks of losing my home and non-payment of bills and moving around over decades, the most stable point of contact for me has been a "free" email address.
Interesting proposition. It seems to me like the first round of this (Hotmail, Yahoo, the free types of accounts AOL offered, Juno, etc) was not about monetizing the data, but about acquiring sticky loyal traffic for their overall portals, to monetize with ads. Remember in the early days you'd log into Yahoo or whatever and the first thing you'd see was your inbox, then later on all these services added a welcome page that would have a bunch of "news/sports/entertainment" type stories, ads, and links to more Yahoo! services. Email was being used then as a loss leader to guarantee you'll be returning several times a week minimum.
I believe it was Google who broke the seal on reading our email to show us targeted ads.
I hear what you're saying that especially for those who go through exceptional circumstances, a free email untethered to any billing account is useful.[1] But it's still sad to me that that concept - admittedly very compelling to Gen-X and millennials who were going through the chaos of college in the 90s and 2000s when email was becoming popular - ended up cementing this idea forever. Both by establishing these identities on a few popular commercial domains like gmail.com, hotmail.com, and yahoo.com, and by setting the expectation that "email shouldn't cost even $1 a year." Most of us pay $60-100 a month for an ISP and another $60-100 a month for a cell phone plan, and $0 of that money pays for email.
[1] I'd argue that for everyone fortunate enough to have more stability of accounts, homes and such, the "moving" problems could have been easily solved by a regulation kind of like cell phone number portability, which shockingly worked out quite well.
The real difference with phones is that they come with their own network, which vaguely incorporates the internetworking protocols. In the pioneering days of the internet, the ISP was the closest thing to you which was actually connected to the Internet. Early email paid attention to store-and-forward protocols, nowadays mailing lists are forced to use DKIM in order to deliver to the large ESPs and can't get it right.
The availability of network connectivity is much more pervasive today, clearly store-and-forward has mostly gone away. (Not to be confused with MTA-MTA hops, although these days most of my mail has exactly one hop on the actual Internet, again demonstrating the pervasiveness of connectivity.)
Not sure about Google and Microsoft, but Facebook was (dunno if they're still in the phone business) the de facto ISP for large numbers of people in the third world.
"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."
Accidentally making a machine learning system that happens to (potentially) do it is a different matter.
i remember ~25 years ago being on-call with a work truck. we were absolutely not allowed to speed, at all, ever. we also absolutely had to be at the customer's site within 45 minutes of being called.
guess how many of my sites were >45 minutes away when traveling the legal speed limit.
This part is worrying.
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
But each airline also maintains their own internal no-fly list for people they prefer to no longer have as customers, for whatever reason. You might end up on this for some abuse of the system that doesn't pose any sort of safety risk, so the government doesn't care, but the airline doesn't like. For example, excessively doing hidden-city ticketing (where you book a flight with a connection, then skip the second leg of the trip, because weird pricing rules make it cheaper than just booking a ticket to the connecting city) can get you banned from the airline, but the government would be completely uninterested.
Now think about all the Gmail data Google has.
> deidentified data
"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.
I can ask "Tell me about Person A's experience with airlines" and it will tell me. Or I can ask more generally, "knowing your knowledge, derive a no-fly list", and then it's likely Person A will be on it.
For example, I think a pretty worrying outcome here is that deidentification is imperfect (not surprising), the data is fed into model training, and then the model makes identity-dependent inferences. Since no one tried to break deidentification, it's within what I'd expect from the company. (And, to be clear, is bad.)
On the other hand, intentional reidentification to work around contractual deidentification to "a sell a product to the airlines that offered to keep annoying people like me from purchasing flights" is the kind of thing that would make Google's lawyers terrified, so we should not expect it.
If you look at how this worked with DoubleClick, Fitbit, etc there were initially barriers to linking data but the mechanism for unlinking was updated agreements with people who had ongoing interaction with the continuing entity. That's not the situation with the Spirit data.
The closest I'd expect to see for a "keep annoying people from purchasing flights" situation is not a list of troublemakers but a model that's very good at scoring future communications from customers, and has learned to distinguish profitable vs unprofitable customers. This is well within what I'd expect from companies, and doesn't require any reidentification.
I don't trust google to do anything out of goodness, they'll do anything they can get away with. Same as all the other big tech firms. Once a firm gets too big it stops having morals.
Maybe, a little. Top comment on an old HN stylometry tool:
“Wow. This gives a lot of false positives, but it found all ~10 of my old accounts over the years.”
There’s a new tool too I saw the other day. And a slightly older one ( https://antirez.com/hnstyle ). Anyway imagine Google’s funding + data + new techniques—shouldn’t be terribly murky these days.
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).
Remember, Google = Ads. Their only focus and only care. Their mission statement, rendered accurately, is “Ads ads ads ads. Effective ads. Ads worth paying a lot for. Ads ads ads. Advertising and ads.”
If they choose to be evil in some additional way, (1) remember, they would only do that if in some way it serves their advertising needs — not to offer innovative new black-hat databroker services to airlines, and (2) this little dataset will not need to be re-identified. They’ll just use the 20 years of email and search data they already have on like half the world’s population.
Do I believe they have incentives to do it now? No, as you point it out for their advertisement cash-cow they can already just rely on their own data (GMail, Search, Google Flights) but nothing stops them from the potential later on, the data is now theirs.
Likely its value is just to train LLMs but the funny thing about data is that you can always try to find ways to extract more value out of it. I'd prefer there was no possibility for that without requiring me to trust Google (or any corporation).
In an ideal world my data would be mine to control, not to be traded in deals among 3rd parties, it's valuable and I've spent time generating it so in a sense I've done free work to be extracted by these corpos.
How can I help them accomplish this goal?
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.
> 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.
The Register is not a serious publication and completely missed this. Other outlets reporting this story do not include the claim that customer data is included.
Do you have a source to back this up? The register has been covering IT since before most people here were born, and literally invented BOFH.
I got a call that started with the usual automated message, "This call is being recorded." After the person joined, I pushed the record button on my iPhone, "This call is being recorded."
They were surprised and asked why I'm recording.
I said, "You're recording, so I'm recording too."
The rep insisted that the company doesn't like this but that they will continue with the call anyway.
Anyway, I wish people took this stuff much more seriously. It always seems to boil down to, "I don't have anything to hide" type of conversations and I've never managed to convince anyone that privacy as a concept isn't about having something to hide.
How is that not two party consent?
If you and I are in a phone call (the target of the phone call located in a one-party consent jurisdiction), I can record it or you can record it without telling the other: that's one-party consent, because one of the parties of the call consents to it
At first glance that may sound pointless, but it means a third party outside the call (e.g. phone company) could not record it without one of us consenting
By notifying that the call is being recorded, that now can create two-party consent because you are still on the line (and thus implicitly agree to the recording, but as you and GGP point out that's not always considered consent enough) -- one-party consent would have been if the company on the other side of the line simply recorded the call without telling you
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”
For example, 20 years ago, few people would have imagined that you could build a fingerprint of a person from all their behaviors on the internet. You didn't need to regulate away certain kinds of data collection to prevent such fingerprinting because it wasn't possible. With ML and AI, it has become possible.
My point is that as technology improves, "de-identification" takes on new meaning. Whatever de-identification was 20 years ago is not what de-identification is today. And whatever de-identification was used here is probably insufficient to guarantee that customers can't be identified.
We need new regulations and we need them yesterday.
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.
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...)
So you show the LLM messages 1,2 and 3 of a 15 email thread. What happens in message 4? 5? 6? Etc.
So it's not just training the model on what these things look like, it's prediction.
Having an entire business, that contains loads of nice time stamped data points from across the entire business is a bit of a gold mine as it can be scrubbed backwards and forwards in time and the AI can predict the outcomes at any stage.
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.
This. Training data companies like Mercor are even creating simulated companies to create similar data, so they can better automate even more white collar work:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/10/business/ai-white-collar-...:
> The data-training start-ups see a lucrative opportunity in recreating workplaces in miniature: controlled environments in which their gig workers can evaluate and reproduce emails, memos and slide presentations in context. The information emerging from such a setup, the companies boast, will help shrink the gap between what A.I. models can accomplish and what office workers actually do from one minute to the next, as ideas and instructions flow between meetings, documents and applications.
> Scale, for example, has said that “our environments replicate real-world workflows,” and that its contractors “curate artifacts that capture the complexity, ambiguity and edge cases of real professional work.”
> Executives see the models’ shortcomings as a sign there’s more for them to do.
> “I often use Claude Cowork, right?” said Edwin Chen, the founder of Surge. “And even though Claude Cowork is incredibly smart, oftentimes it doesn’t quite understand the nuance of Slack. It doesn’t quite understand this ambiguous question I have. It doesn’t quite understand where to go and find this Google document.”
> According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, Mr. Chen’s stake in Surge — and his vision for what it could become — makes him the 258th-richest person in the world.
> “I often think about us as essentially, like, the school for A.G.I.,” Mr. Chen said, referring to a prophesied level of A.I. that surpasses human intelligence. “A.I. comes to us, and A.I. learns to run the world.” He and his customers at the big A.I. labs, he said, are designing the curriculum.
If it comes with the context, yes. More data the better. Someone considered it served some purpose at some point. Thus it contains, no matter how tiny, a sliver of information.
The perfect data to train an agent swarm on how to run a company.
Maybe it's innefficient and inane, but it's how you start.
The first LLMs, GPT-1, 2, were trained on complete garbage, the average document from the common crawl is random non-sense, yet they worked, and now we can use LLMs to filter the data for the next training run.
>The perfect data to train an agent swarm on how to run a company.
The company also failed and went bankrupt. So indeed, a perfect example how to run a company - into the ground!
Lets see if the resulting AI manages to do the same. ;-)
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...
There also is the liability angle, where no one necessarily reads the document until the document is relevant to some situation in the future. Then you better have that document on hand.
The 2 million number is for “supporting” materials which isn’t really defined. It definitely makes for a better soundbite to claim millions.
> its 12,000-page application had around two million pages of support materials.Even though I'm fortunate in so many ways to be in the west - even with the current destructive us government situation, the world is still full of endless misery that I don't ever experience. Like someone living in a war torn country, Gaza, lots of other places.
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.
(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.
there's zero concern if you can associate N flights can only match one person when looked in aggregate, etc.
it's mostly pro forma to pretend you're following some regulation when you're obviously not.
if anyone has a data company and legal connections to demand that a higher level of care be applied, i can charge my hours very cheaply to helpe you make this deal truly anonymous for passengers.
You can also do this if you're not shutting down, but it's probably not worth it.
No. I seem to remember that when pets.com failed, in 2000, their customer data was to be sold.
1786997396 | Google Aims to Boost AI with Purchase of Spirit Airlines Data | https://news.bloomberglaw.com/bankruptcy-law/google-aims-to-... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49336867
1786999370 | Google Aims to Boost AI with $10m Purchase of Spirit Airlines Data | https://news.bloomberglaw.com/bankruptcy-law/google-aims-to-... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49337350
1787007229 | Google Buys Spirit Data for $10M | https://airlinegeeks.com/2026/08/17/report-google-buys-spiri... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338810
1787008371 | Google to buy Spirit Airlines business data for $10M | https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/google-buy-spirit-a... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338973
1787012955 | Google wins bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines emails, chats, documents | https://www.axios.com/2026/08/17/google-spirit-airlines-bank... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49339599
> 100 million emails
How does one deidentify 100 million emails?
When someone less scrupulous than Google starts buying up Snapchat and Kik and Roblox (and other such platforms) and piecing together social graphs with extracurricular activities that's when it will be a lot more dramatic.
which could then be used to train even larger models or even more better models for this exact use case and the cycle could continue.
I had never thought about it but I could see this becoming reality. It's a bit crazy to think but I could so see it happening.
Maybe we might even have where the agents would be paying for us and maybe that becomes the only way to pay, so an agent which knows about your spending power and maybe even more personal info.
I think that there might be some laws against that but it could be paraphrased as a different term. For example, they could raise the overall prices and then have discounts based upon this or many other ways to actively try to do this.
Maybe for example, I could watch a Youtube video and it recommended me a product and then I later buy using my agent and then it could connect the two connections. Something like this might be the end goal of your example perhaps imo. It sounds a bit dystopian to me but I don't know, I feel like future is so unpredictable that the chances of it existing or not all seem so fuzzy to me but It's such a dystopian thought when thinking through the lens of privacy.
Is that one guys story really that much more interesting than the article ?
Huff, what a relief!
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.
Absolutely scary
> 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.
Only a whistle-blower could, it'll all be locked down as trade secrets because it's (allegedly) giving their AI the edge over the competition.
Unfortunately the whistle-blower will never work in big tech again if they do so I don't see it happening.
Not that it really matters, data breaches are happening more then ever with no consequences and data brokers are legal companies.
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.
We are as bad as any authoritarian state in this regard. Difference is businesses are using it directly for profit in addition to handing it over to governments when compelled in increasing numbers.
https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-...
That’s why I’m all against age verification, face recognition etc. The only way to not leaking data is not giving away the data in the first place.
I guess yet another victim of no GDPR in the USA ?
Martha Wells hit it nicely in The Murderbot Diaries.
No I don't want to just use your enshittified service for free. Fucking pay me and watch me all you want :)
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.?