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  • Hacker News
  • In related airline/Google AI data business, just last week:

    Ryanair and Google Cloud Announce Five-Year Data and AI Partnership

    https://www.googlecloudpresscorner.com/2026-08-12-Ryanair-an...

    by ChrisArchitect
  • title can be viewed as googles entire strategic planning objectives realised.

    "google Wins!, Bankruptcy Auction"

    by metalman
  • Data protection laws are at best grossly insufficient, at worst a lie
    by gib444
  • Is this just Enron Corpus 2.0?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_Corpus

    by kotaKat
  • Ah, rare data hunters.
    by geetee
  • ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU4ByUbDKNc
    by krackers
  • Using data from failed businesses as training data: what could go wrong?
    by robocat
  • Maybe we can help businesses fail faster
    by kevmo314
  • Talking like a middle management drone from a failed corporation is perfectly on brand for Google AI.
    by paxys
  • I would love to see a rider from the courts mandating a significant third party test by privacy researchers to see if the deidentified data can be reconstructed from models post training.
    by ygjb
  • The article mentions: a 3rd party company will scrub the data amd Google will promise not to attempt to reconstruct PII from the data.

    That is good enough for me. If they violate their promise to the judge, the court can lay the hammer down on them

    by geoduck14
  • As someone not super familiar with bankruptcy procedure: why do they auction off exclusive access to the data? Couldn't they make more money by, say, taking the top N offers, where N is "small" (e.g., ≤5)? Or does that depress the price too much?
    by igregoryca
  • In theory, a buyer could always execute that strategy after the sale, so it's essentially "priced in". By keeping the auction exclusive, the seller also keeps the possibility that the data is worth more to someone as an exclusive asset.
    by olalonde
  • Anyone see Google's intended use of the collected data spelled out in the "Primary Purpose for Collection and Use of Data" in the Spirit Privacy Agreement? Asking for 1.2 billion Spirit passengers. https://content.spirit.com/Shared/en-us/Documents/Privacy_Po...
    by theodpHN
  • on twitter I read data will be fully anonymized and scrubbed for PII before handover by a third party.

    supposedly google intended purpose is to train LLM's for enterprise/office work etc

    by tough
  • For the 1.2B passengers: the transfer doesn’t contain passenger data, just internal operations data

    Eg. Airline code, marketing materials, pricing histories, etc

    Also, to answer the question:

    > Affiliates and Acquisitions. We may share information with any corporate affiliates (e.g., parent company, sister companies, subsidiaries, joint ventures, or other companies under common control). If another company acquires, or plans to acquire, our company, business, or our assets, we will also share information with that company, including at the negotiation stage.

    by vineyardmike
  • It's high time we get signed warrants that upon bankruptcy all data will be destroyed so it won't be used to make good either the creditors or the shareholders of the company that went under. I can't imagine any good outcome here, and change of control should result in an automatic withdrawal of any consent, no matter what assurances of privacy are given by the buyer.
    by jacquesm
  • Worth a try, but just see how hard it is to get mining companies to clean up literal physical superfund sites.

    How do you even prove all data was destroyed, let alone actually do it?

    by lazide
  • > upon bankruptcy all data will be destroyed

    So, PBS should lose all their archives? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49333344

    by pjc50
  • > The data does not contain any personally identifiable information, according to a court filing by PJT Partners vice president Dylan Friesner, an investment banker for Spirit.

    > The data will be "deidentified" — meaning that it won't be associated with individual people and the buyer agrees not to attempt to re-identify the users.

    Sure, 100 million emails and 500 million chats totally won’t have any mention of customers. No employee has ever shared PII on email or chat. Their redaction is guaranteed to work correctly. Nothing to see here.

    by paxys
  • Doesn't matter. Same as Facebook or any other data hoarder. They use the data to manipulate society. This has always been the problem with personal data as the Red Herring.
    by yahway