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- Hacker News
- The idea that they got an archive of my coworkers tickets that just say "its broke", is amusing.by zf00002
- I wonder how they will use the data. If it was me I’d try to build a simulation of an airline, and then use it as an agent training environment. It really depends on the exact nature of the data what kinds of agents you could train, but maybe customer support (imo the worst AI use case) that are more empowered to make changes, or something for making more autonomous calls when recovering from irrops? Could be some cool’s stuff if a little niche, I hope they share / publish something and it doesn’t just disappear into a void.by andy99
- by KORraN
- Is this the first case of a company's data being sold at bankruptcy for a significant sum? I'm genuinely unsure. Where there such value in this type of data before? Is every bankruptcy manager looking at this and seeing how every bankruptcy can now raise a few million more dollars?by dgrin91
- > Is this the first case of a company's data being sold at bankruptcy for a significant sum?
No. I seem to remember that when pets.com failed, in 2000, their customer data was to be sold.
by Tangurena2 - FYI: If you have a company that you are shutting down, you too can sell your data to the labs. Companies will help you do this. If you have a company with a handful of people and you wrote code, collaborated in Slack, and used task management tools for a few years, you can probably sell this data for $50k or so.
You can also do this if you're not shutting down, but it's probably not worth it.
by zachthewf - The headline is a little on the nose. Nice try but it isnt going to hit the levels of "Headless body in topless bar".by blitzar
- a vegetarian dinosaur, called "the quick bandit", eats shoots and leaves! no idea where he got his name.by isoprophlex
- So the AI service agent can be just as bad as Spirit's service was.by sethammons
- The only way it could be worse if it they bought Comcast's data.by breezybottom
- Google can now stamp out copies of autonomous corporate minds that are clones of Spirit. Haunting.by genxy
- I see from the court PDF that the process here involves Spirit giving the data to a "Deidentification Agent" (a third party firm that Google selects and pays for) who is responsible for stripping out things that would link data to any particular person before passing the data on to Google. Is that a standard thing, such that everybody in this transaction would have said "yes, put in the usual clauses about deidentifying the data" and multiple firms offer this service, or is it something that they custom-specified for this "we want the data for AI" transaction?
(The PDF mentions "the standard for deidentification set forth under the California Consumer Privacy Act", which suggests this is all pretty well legislatively understood.)
by pm215 - They will definitely be selecting the lowest bidder for this. Or perhaps a more expensive bidder if they can find one whose proprietary scrubbing technology is “a half dozen regexes our intern thought up”.by oofbey
- There are deïdentification firms that service primarily the medical industry. Over here they call them trusted third parties.by Tarq0n
- it's one regex. if you detect name, DoB, ssn, credit card, email... you remove it. done
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.
by iririririr - That's interesting that the name of this 3rd party's company is anonymous.by mynameyeff
- Seems the answer is “no” to the first part of your question. From the filing:
> 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.
by junofan - Chances the third party is uploading it to Claude to do the deidentification?by breezybottom
- 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.by Ekaros
- 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.by greggoB
- Companies buying other companies files have been a thing since companies.by tiahura
- How does this have value? Is any and every sentence in an e-mail considered 'fact' and thus to be fed into the AI?
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.
by budman1 - > 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”
by ronbenton - Wello this is troubling. How much other data must they have bought that wasnt publicby stogot
- > 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.
by chii - Most laws are designed to accomplish specific objectives. For example, there might be laws about whether you can collect certain kinds of data, for the sake of privacy or protecting some attribute. As technology improves, however, it may become possible to collect different kinds of data (that are not regulated to not be collected) and still recover the original attribute.
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.
by jsrozner - I don't see how it's possible any more, when correlated against all the various other data sources. And a record that might be unidentifiable now might become unique with more correlated data sources.by imglorp
- > 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.
by js2 - I'm so jaded that my first thought was "oh no, the AI is going to learn terrible customer service."by dbmnt
- It’s certainly a step up from the Enron corpus.by iamacyborg