Comment by js2
1 day 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.
None of that customer data is included in the purchase. Page 18 of the linked court document is the source of these record counts, and on the right is a "Google's Data Purchase Request" column that lists all of this "Customer Behavior" data as "not included".
The Register is not a serious publication and completely missed this. Other outlets reporting this story do not include the claim that customer data is included.
Sure, but there is enough tertiary information that google owns that explicit customer information isn't necessary. They can and will use this to "enhance" customer profiles. It'll cost them time and money, but those are things they have already.
>Register is not a serious publication
Do you have a source to back this up? The register has been covering IT since before most people here were born, and literally invented BOFH.
And the Daily mail was founded in the 1800s. Age of the publication doesn't in any way correlate with the factuality of the reporting.
So what is included?
Is there anything that can legally be done against this? It feels like a breach of consent. Like, it cannot be that when one accept their voice to be recorded for _human_ training they also accept it to be recorded for LLM training
Your comment reminded me of a funny interaction I had a week or so ago.
I got a call that started with the usual automated message, "This call is being recorded." After the person joined, I pushed the record button on my iPhone, "This call is being recorded."
They were surprised and asked why I'm recording.
I said, "You're recording, so I'm recording too."
The rep insisted that the company doesn't like this but that they will continue with the call anyway.
Anyway, I wish people took this stuff much more seriously. It always seems to boil down to, "I don't have anything to hide" type of conversations and I've never managed to convince anyone that privacy as a concept isn't about having something to hide.
What is actually perfect, when the automated voice declares the call is being recorded, you don't have to do it again. You're legally allowed to record, because both parties were informed already and agree to it.
7 replies →
"I have nothing to hide" -> "Ok take off your cloth". Privacy is a useful social construct not some abstract mathematical concept. Everyone has stuff to hide and that's ok.
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Next time, announce you’re recording right after they do, when it’s still in the automated prompts.
[dead]
Some aspects of privacy policies don't survive bankruptcy, I'd wager usage consent does not either. IANAL.
You’re years too late.
I don't think there's any legal weight to the purpose of a recording unless you entered into a contract that has a clause to that effect. They have to tell you that the call is being recorded because of wiretapping laws. They stick "for training purposes" on there just to soften the language and reassure you that they have a good, non-nefarious reason to record. It doesn't actually limit what they're allowed to do with the recording.
Axios claims the acquisition doesn’t contain passenger profiles or frequent flyer info but that data would be trivial to replicate given the Responsys data set which would include records of all transactional emails sent.
30M calls for 10M is definitely a bit cheaper, but google could provide more support on their end and then use that for training...
It’s certainly a step up from the Enron corpus.
I'm so jaded that my first thought was "oh no, the AI is going to learn terrible customer service."
"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.
> 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...
Not like that doesn't already exist, try scanning and printing a bank note (US, not sure if other countries have similar)
I think I'm starting to feel like I'd prefer living through WWIII as opposed to whatever it is we are living through now.
Don’t worry, a Google product can’t survive long enough to build a proper Skynet without being terminated itself.
Finally we know how they assign people to either that A Ark or the B Ark.