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Google has acquired the data of failed US airline Spirit
- KORraN 2mo agoDuplicate? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49339599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49339599
- everyone 2mo agoHow the fuck is that even remotely legal? ... "deidentified" my ass.
- embedding-shape 2mo agoAh, 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.
- sscaryterry 2mo agoAh, trust me bro :)
- akoboldfrying 2mo agoI basically agree, but I'd also say: Every Gmail user has already accepted such a promise as sufficient.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- phatfish 2mo agoI wouldn't be surprised if Gmail data has far more access restrictions internally at Google than this auction bought dump.
- flaburgan 2mo agoBut the Spirit customers may not have a Gmail or even a Google account? I personally don't.
- akoboldfrying 2mo agoSure, a Spirit customer with no Gmail account can absolutely complain and/or be wary of this. I didn't mean what I wrote as a complete counterargument -- just trying to indicate the "scale" of the privacy issue here, which is that it's something that many people already tacitly accept.
- frollogaston 2mo agoEven those customers probably have something that's neither self-hosted nor privacy-focused. If it's not gmail, it's one of the counterparts.
- gspr 2mo ago> Ah, but Google promised to remove PII they found in this deidentified dataset, so worry not. … 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.
- cube00 2mo ago> even if someone can prove that they didn't 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.
- frollogaston 2mo agoHonestly would trust Google more than any other entity to de-identify the data properly.
- Forgeties79 2mo agoWith their army of lawyers? Absolutely not. Guarantee you they’ve already prepped a response along the lines of “someone else was supposed to take care of that before selling it to us we can’t be held accountable for it.”
- frollogaston 2mo agoThat's not how they operate. They don't want the legal risk. Too big a target to be trying to squeeze out little gains that way.
- noir_lord 2mo agoYou 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).
- tiahura 2mo agoIn your country are you not allowed to discuss who you gave a ride to or what they said? It should really make us appreciate living in a country where freedom is the default.
- Forgeties79 2mo agoIn my country (US) car companies can literally collect data on any sexual activity in the vehicle. 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-on-wheels-every-car-brand-reviewed-by-mozilla-including-ford-volkswagen-and-toyota-flunks-privacy-test/ https://www.mozillafoundation.org/en/blog/privacy-nightmare-...
- blitzar 2mo agoThe headline is a little on the nose. Nice try but it isnt going to hit the levels of "Headless body in topless bar".
- isoprophlex 2mo agoa vegetarian dinosaur, called "the quick bandit", eats shoots and leaves! no idea where he got his name.
- steveBK123 2mo agoMaybe they are building a social credit score system
- baggachipz 2mo agoThe social credit system already exists; we're just not allowed to see it.
- radres 2mo agothey wrote a shit article while trying to make some airline puns
- stuaxo 2mo agoWoke up on the wrong side of the bed?
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- js2 2mo 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.
- echelon 2mo ago"This call is being recorded so that Gemini can decide which purge wave to assign you to. Obedient humans will be carried over for further cycles until no longer needed. If you are scheduled for termination this cycle a disposal representative will be with you shortly." 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.
- TeMPOraL 2mo ago> I made the counter argument that watermarks would find their ways into everything and eventually be bound to attestation. 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...
- sethammons 2mo agoSo the AI service agent can be just as bad as Spirit's service was.
- genxy 2mo agoGoogle can now stamp out copies of autonomous corporate minds that are clones of Spirit. Haunting.
- breezybottom 2mo agoThe only way it could be worse if it they bought Comcast's data.
- 398642258909 2mo agoEach Register headline is worse than the last one.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- ronbenton 2mo 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”
- chii 2mo ago> 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.
- MagicMoonlight 2mo ago[dead]
- imglorp 2mo agoI 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.
- mmooss 2mo agoAll you need is gender, birthday, and zip code to uniquely identify ~85% of the Americans (per some study). There is far more data in these records, even before AI there were far more detailed marketing profiles of people, and with AI software, it's likely easy to use it to identify people at scale.
- stogot 2mo agoWello this is troubling. How much other data must they have bought that wasnt public
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- Ekaros 2mo agoAnyone 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 2mo agoI 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.
- usrusr 2mo agoAny kind of fuel for giving active investors that FOMO tingle which then forces the steamroll of index funds to blindly follow. 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.
- hogs_get_fat 2mo agoTruth is even weirder. plenty of growth is possible but modern liberal democracy requires that all progress must be contingent on the production of enormous amounts of text that nobody would ever read. 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-power-ai-operations-e10ff798 https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/microsoft-targets-nuclear-to-pow...
- xrd 2mo agoAbout twenty years ago, I was taking a flight back from Rio de Janeiro, 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 2mo agoyour personal site SSL cert expired 10 days ago btw
- cmiles8 2mo ago“This call is being recorded for quality assurance, and to give us more assets to sell in bankruptcy.”
- Taikhoom10 2mo ago[flagged]
- dec0dedab0de 2mo agofunny, spirit was the only big airline without a crash
- pm215 2mo agoI 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.)
- junofan 2mo agoSeems 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.
- breezybottom 2mo agoChances the third party is uploading it to Claude to do the deidentification?
- rchaud 2mo agoConsidering that the buyer is Google, it's more likely to be a Gemini customer with a Google Cloud plan.
- mynameyeff 2mo agoThat's interesting that the name of this 3rd party's company is anonymous.
- pm215 2mo agoYou wouldn't want to hard-wire the deidentification company's name into the contract between Google and Spirit. Otherwise, if the deident-company happens to go bankrupt or otherwise be unable to do the work then you'd need to re-do the Google-Spirit contract, which would be a massive pain. And you don't want to make "we can sign this with Spirit now" be dependent on "we have first signed the deal with the deident-company". So I think it's reasonable that the contract says "one or more third parties acceptable to or designated by Buyer" rather than being specific here.
- Razengan 2mo agoI would love it if there were services where I could let them see everything I do, including when I poo and wank, if they just directly paid me for it. No I don't want to just use your enshittified service for free. Fucking pay me and watch me all you want :)
- xyzelement 2mo agoWe don't want your data if you are getting off on it.
- evek 2mo agoTangental, but can’t wait for automated blackmail from crawlers continuously digging through my digital footprint. /s Martha Wells hit it nicely in The Murderbot Diaries.
- lovetocode 2mo agoI can’t help ask but what? They say it’s for training their models. On what? One of the most horribly run airlines to ever exist?
- TeMPOraL 2mo ago> On what? One of the most horribly run airlines to ever exist? 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.
- Mistletoe 2mo ago“Gemini, do the opposite of everything in the Spirit archives.”
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- genxy 2mo agoSo they didn't even have to build the torment nexus, they just bought it. Only bad can happen.
- zf00002 2mo agoThe idea that they got an archive of my coworkers tickets that just say "its broke", is amusing.
- andy99 2mo agoI 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.
- Forgeties79 2mo agoThat title is a bit much. I get they’re going for “wordplay” but at first glance I thought they were buying the data from crashed flights…?
- hn_submit 2mo agoI wonder if the owners of YCombinator have sold all comments to Big Tech for A.I. training. 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.?
- Forgeties79 2mo agoI don’t know why any company would pay. It can’t be that difficult to scrape this site and they already did it indiscriminately for years, violating laws and taking down public libraries and other public resources with no regard for their impact.
- hn_submit 2mo agoSure it can be scraped, but it's so much easier if you just get a single database with everything in it. These are companies flush with cash you know.
- efreak 2mo agohttps://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?p=bigquery-public-data&d=hacker_news&page=dataset https://console.cloud.google.com/bigquery?p=bigquery-public-... No idea how to to date it is, but there's two different apis available (official and algolia) if you need to update it.
- bitmasher9 2mo agoAre all of the messages public and crawlable?
- siva7 2mo agoNot sure if you're serious but a) all HN data is publicly downloadable and used by frontier labs and b) the origin of OpenAI tracks down to former YC CEO sama who was thereafter fired from YC
- wewewedxfgdf 2mo agoI can make them millions of emails and I'll charge them only $2 million not $10 million.
- balderdash 2mo agoGreat - now spirit will be the “model”, could you pick a worse example?
- khernandezrt 2mo ago"Crashed airline". What a weird way to phrase that...
- mynameyeff 2mo agoData is the new petroleum
- dgrin91 2mo agoIs 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?
- Tangurena2 2mo ago> 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.
- pelzatessa 2mo ago>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.* Huff, what a relief!
- nojs 2mo ago> a huge trove of deidentified data > 100 million emails How does one deidentify 100 million emails?
- frollogaston 2mo agoRemove the sender and recipient and any other PII probably
- estetlinus 2mo agoIve been thinking about data accumulated from all the out-of-business companies. Interesting to see data is being auctioned like an asset.
- al_hag 2mo agoI must be naive. I was under the impression Google wants this data to learn from a universally hated company's worst processes and practices, i.e. to teach their AI what not to do. It seems people are worried about their pii or that Google is curating a blacklist of customers?
- thewhitetulip 2mo agoThis is scary. If you have a reddit account that ever links to another social media then Gemini knows every about you Absolutely scary
- cher88 2mo agoIt’s data - curious why they’re selling it only to one party (Google) vs. multiple buyers
- hacker_88 2mo agoLearning from Failure, what kind of ai would it be
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- ChrisArchitect 2mo ago[dupe] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49339599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49339599
- zachthewf 2mo agoFYI: 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.
- vladshiyan 2mo ago[flagged]
- cdrnsf 2mo agoAh yes, capitalism’s final form: the vampire squid.
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- gepeake 2mo agoGemini will now know how to run a dysfunctional business, perfect
- everdrive 2mo agoRemember. If you use a service right now, even if you (somehow) fully trust the service, you have no idea what will happen in the future. New CEO wants to make more money? Your data is sold. Parent company goes under? Your data is sold. Poor security? Your data is sold.
- reorder9695 2mo agoI wonder how this is treated in terms of consent (at least from a GDPR perspective in the EU), even if I gave my data to Spirit, I did not consent to it being shared with Google unless they explicitly said they would share it with that partner and I agreed. Surely they can't just retroactively change the scope of consent for data sharing?
- charlieyu1 2mo agoBut who will be held liable? The defunct company? 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.
- atleastoptimal 2mo agoThe most likely outcome of AI + data buildup is a system of perfect price discrimination. Models will know exactly the absolutely maximum you'd be willing to pay for a service, and price everything offered to you at one cent less. All consumer surplus is siphoned into the hyperscalers.
- Imustaskforhelp 2mo ago> All consumer surplus is siphoned into the hyperscalers. 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.
- Havoc 2mo agoNo doubt for an entirely wholesome purpose!
- chiefskepticoff 2mo ago[dead]
- josh-wrale 2mo agoWhere can I find such data for sale on a smaller scale?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo ago1786990841 | Google Aims to Boost AI with Purchase of Spirit Airlines Data | https://news.bloomberglaw.com/bankruptcy-law/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=49335370 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49335370 1786997396 | Google Aims to Boost AI with Purchase of Spirit Airlines Data | https://news.bloomberglaw.com/bankruptcy-law/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 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-boost-ai-with-purchase-of-spirit-airlines-data https://news.bloomberglaw.com/bankruptcy-law/google-aims-to-... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49337350 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49337350 1787007229 | Google Buys Spirit Data for $10M | https://airlinegeeks.com/2026/08/17/report-google-buys-spirit-data-for-10m/ https://airlinegeeks.com/2026/08/17/report-google-buys-spiri... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338810 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-airlines-business-data-10-million-2026-08-17/ https://www.reuters.com/legal/litigation/google-buy-spirit-a... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49338973 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-bankruptcy https://www.axios.com/2026/08/17/google-spirit-airlines-bank... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49339599 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49339599
- Melatonic 2mo agoThis has to the most off topic comments I've seen in a HN post. Is that one guys story really that much more interesting than the article ?
- midtake 2mo agoAt least this has ostensibly a mission-driven purpose, to improve automated customer support. 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.
- m4rtink 2mo agoThis really should be all illegal - you communicate with a company, possibly including sensitive information to solve the issue at hand. Not so that 10 years later someone pick up the cadaver & miss-uses all its secrets for whatever they see fit. I guess yet another victim of no GDPR in the USA ?