I’m not sure how, but buying a company for just the data should be illegal.
Unfortunately even though that isn’t the case here, companies get bought up for parts all the time.
Court records reveal that the Google purchase includes 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, 7.2 billion records for competitors’ flights, 7.5 billion passenger transaction records from 2008, and more than 175,000 employee records from 1986. Aside from this, the company will also get information on revenue, aircraft operations, employee productivity records, audits and fraud, marketing campaigns, human resources records, project management, and pricing curve data, among others.
This could be a cause of concern for anyone who’s ever transacted with the airline, either as a customer, employee, contractor, or even investor, especially as AI is known for its privacy problems.
Add it to the list of reasons to always use email aliases as well as unique passwords and phone numbers!
And never work for any company ever, apparently.
If my place of business goes bankrupt, is Google going to get access to my employment records? The memes I share in work chats? My disciplinary record? My bank account details I used for direct deposit?
If someone puts that they worked at Spirit on a resume, what is the likelihood that job openings will start to query these things to see how far they can lowball someone on wages, or whether they’re a “difficult” employee? This is shit that runs the risk of following someone for life.
Everyone loses here. It’s no longer possible to trust any organisation with your data, because no matter what they say or do, they have no control over what will happen to it if they ever become insolvent.
“Anonymized”
Do you know how easy it is to deanonimize it? Clearly the regulators and politicians don’t care.
Especially if you’re Google. Matching “anonymous” travel activity to their Google Maps, login, Chrome, and Gmail history should be pretty trivial with a high success rate.
To them it’s a feature, not a bug.
Certainly only good things coming from this news.
So when Gemini is used to plan the next 9/11, surely someone will object. Right?
Im sure gemini will offer “thoughts and prayers”
OpenAI would try to gaslight us into thinking it never actually happened. Grok would take credit and claim antifa forced it to do it. Apple Intelligence would try to convince me the ithing air, now 30% thinner, would have survived the impact.
Shouldn’t something like that be illegal? The data-sharing authorization certainly applied only to the airline.
Sue them.
I mean, should if you can defend your rights. Anyway, posted from Moscow, Russia, so I’m stopping.
“something something transferrable something something”
Ah I forgot this isn’t EU.
“anonymized”
Fudge! I rode Spirit once and it was roughly 10 yrs ago. Yall think they got my info??
Weird to think there was data Google didn’t already have.
We should profit from the purchases we make that become data for someone else to profit from.
I hate this timeline.
Disgusting.
