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?
> 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.
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.
I really doubt all this stuff was “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.
(The PDF mentions "the standard for deidentification set forth under the California Consumer Privacy Act", which suggests this is all pretty well legislatively understood.)
No I don't want to just use your enshittified service for free. Fucking pay me and watch me all you want :)
> 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.
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).
Martha Wells hit it nicely in The Murderbot Diaries.