Comment by xrd
1 day ago
About 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?
I'll never understand this attitude toward airlines. What did you want them to do in this situation? Keep flying the plane with engine issues so you could make your important meetings? It sounds like the airline did the right thing here but you were still mad?
I'll flip this around and say I've never understood why an airline is viewed as a special case. In the general case, if you enter into a contract and pay for a service, then don't receive that service, you're entitled to sue the service provider for your losses. For example, if I turn up to a hotel I booked only to find that the room isn't available, I'm entitled to sue the hotel for my cost in finding a reasonable last minute replacement. That's the case even if the room wasn't available because it was unsafe for some reason.
Of course nobody is expecting that they "keep flying the plane with engine issues so you could make your important meetings". But ultimately you relied on them to get you to that meeting, and they failed to do so, so you should be compensated so that you're no worse off than if they had provided the service. The fact that an airline will sometimes fail to get their customers to their destination and will have to compensate them for it, is just the cost of doing business.
Luckily in the UK and the EU your right to compensation for delayed flights is enshrined in law.
In the UK and EU you absolutely do not have the right to be compensated for sales or deals not closed in part due to a delayed flight.
Your entire point is completely at odds to reality. In the general case, contracts do not guarantee there are never problems, and problems happening do not create an automatic entitlement to sue. The entire point of contracts is to protect both parties.
Ultimately, if you are travelling, you are relying on *you* to get yourself there. Airlines and hotels will help, there's compensation available to some degree, but extrapolating that out to "everything is someone else's responsibility and I deserve to be compensated for everything I hoped to achieve" is pure fantasy.
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This would require airlines underwriting the value of the meetings that you might miss and pricing their services accordingly. I imagine an airline would never sell a flight to CEOs on their way to board meetings, or actors on their way to filming a big budget movie.
You can absolutely find someone willing to sell you insurance on whatever you need for a price, but the airline isn't in the business of insuring the value of your meetings.
> In the general case, if you enter into a contract and pay for a service, then don't receive that service, you're entitled to sue the service provider for your losses.
Do you think this is how companies sell things? With uncapped liability?
Do you think AWS reimburses customers for their lost revenue when they have an outage?
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Airlines are quite a special case. Learned a lot from this a few months ago:
https://davidoks.blog/p/why-airlines-are-always-going-bankru...
I've had plenty of bad airline experiences and wished they gave me more for my trouble, but clearly they are unable to at current margins. If you want the market to provide a better service, it already does: you can pay tons more to fly private, either a charter or your own jet you purchased!
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There are exceptional cases, detrimental to both you and the company. Company already swallowed a pretty serious loss, in that case arguably common sense is to let it go, sometimes sh*t happens.
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> In the general case, if you enter into a contract and pay for a service, then don't receive that service, you're entitled to sue the service provider for your losses.
This generally only applies to direct losses, though. If Amazon ships you a defective Bic pen, and it leaves you unable to sign a time-critical $1B contract, Amazon is only liable for the cost of the Bic pen - not the resulting $1B loss.
You might be able to sue for the cost of obtaining a replacement pen, but anything beyond that isn't going to happen without some kind of bespoke SLA.
I believe the contract you enter into is that the airline will get you to your destination safely. I don't believe there's any special case there.
FWIW I think we should have the same laws in the US that you all have in the UK and EU.
I don’t think airlines are a special case? They should compensate you for cancelled flights, delays etc, which sounds like they did. What you seem to be asking for is compensation for… actually I’m not sure what. What is the value of the missed meeting they should compensate?
If you take a taxi to a meeting and the taxi broke down so you missed some important meeting, should the taxi driver / company compensate you for that too? Or do they just refund you the fare, or pay for a different taxi?
You must never read the contracts you enter into. Nearly every contract limits the liability of the service provider to the amount you paid them. Short of proving fraud or negligence, you're not going to get more than that.
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My understanding is that there is no arrival time SLA when you buy a plane ticket (barring the compensation ladder set by EU regulators). All they owe you is getting you and your stuff to the destination.
> But ultimately you relied on them to get you to that meeting, and they failed to do so, so you should be compensated so that you're no worse off than if they had provided the service.
By this logic, should I be able to sue Brooks Brothers for lost earnings if I split my pants in the middle of a sales pitch? Goodyear if I blow a tire on the way to a job interview? Taco Bell if I crap my pants in the middle of Jeopardy?
You are basically arguing that travelers with little to lose from a delay should subsidize travelers with a lot to lose, they would pay the same ticket prize but end up with different payouts.
I don't think that's reasonable. If you have a lot to lose then extra insurance should be a premium offering.
I suppose consider yourself lucky that you haven't yet been inconvenienced by an issue completely within the airline's control and been offered $50 in funny money even though you had to pay out of pocket for your dingy hotel and transport in/out of the airport at 11pm/6am the next morning. And no, they won't reimburse that, because you could have slept on the terminal floor for free
I on the other hand will never understand anyone extending any grace to an airline. They are constantly testing just how poor of an experience they can deliver to their customers and stay in business.
For starters, they could have offered more than $100 to OP here
I travel all the time. I've missed or been late to all sorts of events because of delayed, canceled, and diverted flights over the years. It's the nature of air travel. It's an extremely dynamic environment that is not in the complete control of the pilot or or the airline. To have the attitude that the company personally owes you because of something like that is, imo, ridiculous. I understand that there are extreme cases where the airline screws up and in those cases you should receive compensation. I once sat on the tarmac at JFK for 4 hours and JetBlue offered me a measly $50 voucher. A plane having mechanical trouble over the Amazon rainforest, diverting safely to a large and safe city, then getting put up in a hotel room for the night does not count as an extreme case of the airline screwing up.
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Because airlines don't -and can't- promise incident free travel. They promise to get you to your destination. They don't like engine problems and the domino effect that has on their routing any more than you do. Saying this as someone with over a million miles flown, I've seen the worst sides of airlines. But let's be real, their slim margins cannot support bonusing out every passenger with a sob story about getting delayed.
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The airlines are certainly bad actors, the problem on the other side is there are a massive number of people that are willing to waste massive amounts of time to get undeserved freebies if the boundary is too permissive. I agree with your underlying sentiment that the needle is too strongly on the side of the airlines at the moment, but I think if they shifted towards a more healthy stance they'd quickly be swamped by these abusers.
I'm curious what the game theoretic optimal here is.
>I on the other hand will never understand anyone extending any grace to an airline. They are constantly testing just how poor of an experience they can deliver to their customers and stay in business.
It's actually pretty simple to understand how I offer them grace, it's because they're terrible businesses with terrible financials. Airlines run on brutally thin margins, barely 5% in the best of years and usually closer to 1-3% in average years, and frequently wipe themselves out, as Spirit did here. They generally make less than 10 USD in profit per customer.
Because I don't want to pay an extra 100 USD for a marginally nicer experience, and w neither does anyone else. I want the cheapest possible way to be thrown through the air across an ocean. I'm not going to fault them for acting like assholes when I pay them like an asshole.
You could have bought travel insurance. Just like you do with expensive packages in shipping. If your business meetings were critical, you should have insured the trip for an amount that offsets or covers the cost.
These situations are regulated in Europe.
But then corporates go brainwashing on tv that too much regulations are killing business.
You can have rights or ease of business, nailing both, sounds difficult.
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The pilot did the right thing, the company didn't.
I think that in the EU, compensation for such an event is at least 600€, plus all expenses paid (including meals, hotel, etc...). The airline most likely offered $100 as an attempt to settle for way less than what they legally owe.
Without further information, we can't really blame the company for the incident itself, and they may have had no other option regarding what happened in Manaus, but they definitely had the option of offering proper compensation instead of threats.
Agreed. Before I had finished reading, I honestly thought you declined the $100 because everything ended up alright, you got to see some dolphins, and have a cool story to tell.
Same. I really thought that was going to be the next sentence. Was honestly shocked when I kept reading. Such a strange attitude.
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I read the main objection as being with an airline exploring option to put a traveler on a no-fly list. Not due to anything related to security, but purely as a punishment for exploring compensation options. This, in my book, is VERY bad and and deserves public shaming of the airline, complaints to regulators, etc. etc.
Everything else IMO is just fine. The airline landed the plane safely, made some promises (including a single room), could not keep all of those promises, the passenger pushed for more compensation than what airline offered, etc. That happens thousands of times every day all over the world. But this does not remove the big black mark of exploring putting a passenger on a no-fly list. My 2c.
Read his comment again. He says he rejected the $100 and then started arguing and threatening to go to court. That's when they started exploring banning him from the airline.
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Yeah I don't get what the airline did wrong there.
They failed to uphold their end of the contract and caused OP to experience damages.
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This has nothing to do with OPs point though. Their point is about the data that was harvested and sold.
They are supposed to make sure this doesn't happen. Or if it does have better recovery.
Don't skimp on maintenance, make sure you have planes that can do divert in time.
If there was engine troubles in the middle of the ocean would it still be okay?
When something like this happens, at the very least you should get the full cost of your ticket back, plus reimbursement for lodging and food, at least. Then maybe airlines would have more of an incentive to maintain their fleet better, and have backup planes so this kind of thing doesn't happen very often.
I don't think you understood his comment. The emergency landing was not necessarily the problem; it was everything the airline did to remediate that after the fact.
I think you’re failing to identify the important part of the story.
Also wondering why you'd fly Spirit from Brazil to the US.
Parent commenter never said it was Spirit. (I kind of doubt that they ever operated in Brazil.) Just that this is the kind of data they would be worried about being sold.
Do proper maintenance so they don’t have engine issues, and carry insurance to compensate passengers in case they do?
There is no amount of maintenance that can avoid all mechanical issues. Take bird strikes, for example.
Regarding "carry insurance": margins in the airline business are notoriously slim. They compete very heavily on cost, because the service they provide is a commodity (or close to it). Most airlines will probably not willingly add any extra costs that they don't have to, because that would put them at a disadvantage relative to their competitors.
For those passengers who are willing to pay extra to be reimbursed for delays or other inconveniences, there may be travel insurance that can provide that.
Op clearly wasn’t mad at the pilot for doing their job. Op is mad at the company for trying to downplay the situation with $100.
Insane bruv
I hate some airline polices as much as anyone, and it is absolutely terrible to loose a meeting, family reunion, cruise ship vacation, etc. for something like this, but it is way worse to die. If airlines compensated with whatever money you think you deserve, the tickets would cost way more than they already are. Shit happens. You are not entitled to compensation for everything shitty that happens in the world.
> You are not entitled to compensation for everything shitty that happens in the world.
This is true, but not relevant here?
If you pay for a service, and you don't get that service, are you implying that you should just be SOL?
If the plane has an issue, and the pilot rightfully lands it for safety concerns, but the paying passengers don't get where they are going, that sounds like the airline's problem to me, not the passengers' problem.
At the very minimum the passenger should be refunded for their ticket, because they didn't get what they paid for.
There are already too many negative consequences in the world of commercial transactions that the end-consumer gets saddled with simply because they don't have the leverage, money or time to fight for redress.
Uhm, properly compensate passengers that have concrete harm to point to instead of offering a laughable alibi payment? What I'll never understand is why some neoliberal schools of thought defend conglomerates like they're their children... This company has enough money to compensate for fuck-ups, at least it should have. Every insurance on the planet can do the simple math involved for this risk assesment.
Agree, isn't this precisely what credit-card companies promise to cover? I'd think I would just claim flight-interruption with the credit card insurance and it should cover all expenses.
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A decent reimbursement.
Not parents fault the airline flies around with defective hardware.
Usually this is regulated by law.
Perhaps they want the airlines to do a better job maintaining their fleet such that the airline is capable of meeting its obligations with respect to arriving on time without crashing.
This is an unfair take. Airlines already take maintenance very seriously. Knock them for their customer service all you want, but engineering doesn't deserve it.
> 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.
What if they only pretended to forward it to you by mistake and you /were/ supposed to see it?
As in "it would be a shame if you could never fly again".
In the United States legal system, when you take a plea because the Government was threaning you with a 20 year sentence the judge requires in court and under oath for you to state that you were not coerced/pressured in any way to take the plea (because pleas wouldn't be valid if the Government pressured you into them and into signing away your rights).
Before you push back at your work you have to consider possible loss of work and therefore housing/medical insurance/food.
The entire US system is designed around baked in blackmail of the individual into conforming. Not surprising at all to see the airline turn the no fly list into that pressure, it's the main technique we know to motivate people in the USA.
Re: plea deals. Most people don't know that plea deals are very common. Over 90% of convictions come from plea deals.
It's not just that lawyers are expensive and court is risky. Court also takes fucking forever. Somewhere along the way, a right to a speedy trial has been lost. People have jobs they have to get back to, families they have to provide for. The plea deal is often a way out right now, with the tradeoff of having a conviction.
Even if you're 100% innocent, it's often the better financial choice to just... take a guilty plea. The end result is we can't really say, for sure, how many convictions are actually guilty people.
The calculus gets even more complicated when we consider race. If you're a large black man, are you really going to want to take the chance in trial? If you're a meek white woman, you might be more inclined.
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> The entire US system is designed around baked in blackmail of the individual into conforming.
Back when I still argued with people on reddit I was shocked to learn that normies actually believe this is a good thing. Particular example was that the fact that so much of your life is tied to your workplace and you can get fired for political activity outside of your work. This shuts down any non-mainstream discussions. They were like "yes this is exactly what we want".
When I tried to explain "ok but there were times when racism and homophobia were the mainstream, do you think people advocating for equality should've lost their jobs for their political activity" I always got in response 502 Internal Server Error.
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I fully share your concerns. And I don't understand how apparently tons of Teams and email conversations can be archived and sold without any kind of scrutiny. How can such data be sold without the consent of all involved parties? What gives Google the right to use it to train LLMs? Is that just a way of washing away the legal protections?
It is being scrutinized. The sale is overseen by the courts. Also, the media is scrutinizing. Also, PII has already been addressed by the court, from the article: "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."
"De-identified" data is trivially easy to re-identify, especially by google.
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/a-face-is-expo...
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I'm sure we can trust google to keep to their word and that we can trust a bankrupt airline to do their best at removing pii.
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I prior worked at Google, I can say they DO de-anonymize data. You’d be foolish to think some PM within the company wouldn’t use this for malice. L
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I'm sorry but such assurances are worthless without being explicit what was scrubbed and what is retained. An "anonymous" customer ID with a list of flights is very identifiable when you have other information about the trips someone has taken. PII is not a binary yes or no and even benign data can become a problem in aggregate.
This is when a track record of Google's "Don't be evil" motto, culture and corporate habits being literally front and center on its official code of conduct, instead of moved to the very last line in 2018, would have persuaded people to give it the benefit of the doubt. Functionally effective privacy seems to be retreating ever more exclusively into the domain of very wealthy families and behind the corporate veil (by purchasing information scrubbing services on a regular basis), and the loss by normal people of the commons of mass privacy has unfortunately not been appreciated by the common citizen. It is a more valuable commons than recognized by most citizens, and is being rapidly co-opted and monetized by commercial entities that are not aligned with individual interests.
Even as an investor who stands to benefit from that monetization in the short term, I stand against this trend because like any Tragedy of The Commons economic scenario, in the long term (which isn't that long due to the automation that harvests this resource) it sows the seeds of its own dilution into functionally near non-commercial value.
pinky promise?
Makes one appreciate living in place with sufficient constitutional protections against this sort of stuff. Even for work stuff selling this info wouldn't fly in some parts of the world.
If you're referring to GDPR, companies routinely evade such protections using "informed consent" / "legitimate interests" loopholes. The big ones get caught once in a while, get a slap on the wrist and continue to do whatever they were doing before, albeit with more safeguards.
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Not for nothing, but you have probably already consented. Typically user agreements allow for this kind of sale if you’ve authorized use and processing but YMMV.
Usually when you work a job you sign a little thing that says "yeah you own everything I produce for you, no matter how small".
Which is, of course, ridiculous, and follows the trend of absurdist contract law wrangling in corporations. Similar to non-competes and NDAs.
It makes sense to some degree, but the fact that semi-private conversations are included in that makes no sense. These have little to no business purpose.
The party owning this data (Spirit Airlines) is consenting to the sale. Employees and customers of Spirit consented when they started employment and did business with Spirit, respectively.
If this were a European company: That’s not how the GDPR works. You can only consent to specific purposes of using the data.
This is why the GDPR (and to a lesser extent the CCPA) is a good thing. The data was supplied for a specific purpose. The handler of the data should have to obtain further consent if they wish to use it for another purpose.
Did they consent? Just because one receives a letter it doesn't mean they “own” it, much less that they are entitled to publish it at their leisure. If Spirit were active in any country with GDPR-style laws, the seller of these data would be most likely investigated.
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Since it’s work communications, consent was already given.
When you join a company, you typically sign an agreement that talks about how the company owns all your output. Thumbs upping a Teams message is work output and they own it.
Every email sent and received. Every keystroke. Etc etc etc.
If you don’t want your employer to log and sell it, start your own company. Or use a personal device. I do the latter.
I don't know the US law, but surely in Europe specifically every private conversation is private, period. No matter if it's work email, your company cannot read the emails directed at your company mailbox by its initiative (of course in case it's needed a judge can ask it to be taken as evidence), nor it can read the files on your computer, or anything similar, no matter if the device it's company provided, because it would be considered the same as using a camera to spy on the employee, that is of course illegal.
Of course if it's shared communication media (e.g. a mailing list) it can, but not at your private address, no matte if it's @company.com, it's considered the same as your private email.
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That's not consent. It's a one-sided condition of employment. Consent would imply a meeting of the minds and a way for each employee to negotiate, or opt-out without losing employment.
It's like saying I consent to my phone company's 200 page long terms and conditions.
Corporate America has a very fucked up definition of consent, and they seem to have spread that definition broadly.
> How can such data be sold without the consent of all involved parties?
In the US, whoever owns the computer owns the data on it. Courts have routinely ruled that you have no say in what other people collect about you. The goal of bankruptcy courts is to minimize the losses of the creditors. And bankruptcy courts routinely rewrite contracts except where statute prevents it (like mortgages).
In the EU, you own the data about yourself. A lot of people utterly hate GDPR, but that's reason that you own the data about yourself.
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Mass automated data collection and automated analysis are probably the biggest threat to freedom in the present day.
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Why should corporations have the same rights and freedoms as human beings?
I think this is a far more important question than do you believe in right or left economic policy. idc, I want you to know, do you think a human’s rights, especially many humans together, outweigh that of non living entities like large tech companies.
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What a load of crap. Your liberty to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. What's "triggering" is when it hits my nose.
A product that lets airlines keep annoying people off them isn't worth enough to either the airlines or Google for it to be worth releasing.
My very first project at Google made them about $180M. It was canceled after about 3 years because it didn't move the needle. If it doesn't make at least a billion, it's not worth the distraction to the executives. I was like "Well can I quit and buy it back, I would love to make $180M", but no, it was too tied in to Google infrastructure to make a clean split, and would cost more in lawyers and exec attention to be worth it.
Most likely Google is using this so that they have actual training data on how a company runs internally. What kind of emails do people send? What actions are taken in response to them? What starts out as a chat and then becomes an email? What do communication architectures inside the company look like? Whose job is superfluous and doesn't actually add to the bottom line? Who does the same thing over and over again, which can be replaced by a computer and LLM?
They can then build this into the next release of Gemini and bundle it with their Cloud offerings, where it will generate much more than a billion dollars in sales to all sorts of organizations, without anyone much caring about the individual people who make up the data set.
> 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?
The OP article is quite poor in terms of information provided, but the buyer (Google) had to explicitly agree not to attempt to re-identify users. https://www.axios.com/2026/08/17/google-spirit-airlines-bank...
The OP article is also wrong on multiple counts. "Customer behavior" data like call recordings and email addresses/activity is specifically not included in Google's purchase. See page 18 of the court document they link, the "Google's Data Purchase Request" column on the right lists what is and isn't included.
I'd be amused if a sub-sub-agent organically decided to do it anyway - even if just for a notable figure that an LLM can identify with its weights alone. What are the controls? Who's going to keep Google accountable? Hah.
I know Meta it's not Google, but it's worth remembering that these promises haven't had a great measure of success in the past:
> Facebook has been fined €110m (£94m) by the EU for providing misleading information about its 2014 takeover of WhatsApp. (...) When Facebook took over the WhatsApp messaging service in 2014, it told the commission it would not be able to match user accounts on both platforms, but went on to do exactly that.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/may/18/facebook-fi...
But did they agree to not re-sell the data to someone else and let them re-identify users?
> A representative from that airline was asking internally if they could put me on the no-fly list.
These are the kinds of scary scenarios that people should fight and push back on opaque, unaccountable laws that other people and organisations in power try to enact in the name of safety and security, and we need to collectively fight back when someone is charged, or worse "taken away", without due process and visibility.
I got to the part where you declined the $100 and thought you declined it because you had gotten some memorable experiences and that was payment enough.
The story really didn't go the way I expected.
Just to dispel some Brazil myths:
1) +95% of the population live on the coast very far away from the Amazon. Most of the population has not been there. Most of the coast has a very different jungle biome called Mata Atlantica and the countryside close to the coast is not that different from temperate forest of Europe. That is what most all Brazilians are used to. There is a significant population in the arid northeast though and the cold south as well (which is even more similar to europe).
2) Manaus is the biggest city in the Amazon and it is huge developed place (and has been for decades). You are not in the middle of the jungle if you land in the airport. The countryside around the city is jungle though.
3) Brazilian people do not necessarily like or are used to tacos and spicy food. Mexico is _really_ far away from Brazil.
I would not be offended by the blood donation thing. They generalize based on administrative regions (Amazonas in this case) and not whether you visited a big developed city or not.
I had a similar blood donation issue for visiting a particular island in the Philippines, and could not donate for 4 months.
It is funny there is no similar treatment about TBE (tick disease) which is predominantly an European disease and very dangerous and much more common than Malaria is in most (all?) South American countries...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tick-borne_encephalitis
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I'm sitting here chuckling because you felt the need to post this.
Your points are valid. And there probably are plenty of Americans who needed the correction. But still.
I think 2) in particular makes some bits of the story evident that, at least, weren’t so obvious to me. I’m not well informed about the geography of the Amazon. For example, if Manaus is reasonably built up, I guess the hotel situation was mostly Spirit cheaping out rather than a limit on the actual hotel capacity of the town.
I have a german last name, do you know how often people outside Brazil act weird when they learn I am Brazilian?
My grandparents came to Brazil right after WW1 way before the Nazis came to power. High ranking Nazis fled to south america because there were a lot of germans living there already. Nearly all german people who moved to south america did it way before WW2.
I just run into this stuff a lot living in Europe.
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Honestly at this point it is usually the Europeans that need this (I have been asked if Chile has good tacos from a European). At least in my experience, most USians (in spanish Americans means everyone in the hemisphere) now know more about South America than the average European.
(Which is to be expected, proximity and all)
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Why are Americans in particular expected to know details about every country on Earth?
Do you think Canadians know all these facts about Brazil? Do Indians? Or Swedes? It's only Americans that are smugly called ignorant for not knowing about the entire world.
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That was only 3 myths. Hardly a brazilian
Not even a gorillion
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This sounds like a correction to OP, but I don't think OP expressed any of these opinions.
Incidentally, only 54% of the Brazilian population lives within 150km of the coast. https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1bk6x0d/according_...
It seems like you had a nice, unexpected experience due to the incident. I didn't expect your story to end up in you threatening to take them to court.
> 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.
RTFP?
Agree. Some people really fail to see the bright side of things. Sad.
So what happened to the sloth??? Don't bury the lead, man!
The sloth was returned to his owner and I did tip him. That kid is probably still prowling the Amazon (as an adult now), looking for sucker tourists like me.
Fantastic hustle from the kid. Game recognize game.
You probably should have taken the kid to small claims, that was extortion
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>Isn't my poor writing style basically my signature? How do you wipe that?
Stylometry obfuscation is a surprisingly strong point in favor of using wholly LLM generated writing to rephrase your points. If someone sees a — and doesn't know you're intentionally trying to snuggle good points through blandly mellifluous prose, they'll just assume you're like every other boring dangerous professional out there. Nothing to worry about.
That's exactly how it will go. Few controlling everything, and a slip might make you not able to live.
Aren't there like ToS/SLA whatever the word is when you buy tickets that cover what's promised? I don't really get what they did wrong landing. If they had to cover every case then I'd expect super high variance on prices to cover routes more likely to cause problems. Is your contention that they slacked on maintenance? I guess i still don't understand what your expectation was. Just more money? Does anyone know if higher tier ticket classes come with more reimbursement? Maybe it's newer thing where the airlines offer insurance and the credit cards offer separate insurance. I'd be curious if they existed 20 years ago and if they would've helped in your situation.
To be clear, I hate airlines. It's one of the sectors that has certainly gone back down in terms of user experience. I have had shitty experiences, but also experiences where they surprised me with service. Those latter experiences were actually based on the credit card now that I think about it. On the plus side a lot more people get to fly now.
I agree with your very last concern about data.
your personal site SSL cert expired 10 days ago btw
I love the irony of you checking them out for more information in response to a comment of them being worried about who reads their data. Nothing wrong with it, just make me chuckle
There's something about circles of control in this, that makes the difference. If I publish information about myself, that's about me, and it's in my control.
If someone else shares information about me, without my consent, and someone uses that to nose in on me, that feels creepy and problematic.
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Suckers pay companies for expensive SSL monitoring products, smart people just post to HN.
Doh, thanks!
UptimeKuma is self-hosted and can monitor SSL expiry...
Airlines are giant money losing organizations. They are kept on life support either as a national pride thing, an essential service or in America they are actually credit card companies.
I think most business will decline to do any further business with you after you threaten to sue them. There are even patent licenses that automatically get voided in the event you sue your counterparty for any reason.
Manaus has a population of 2.2 million people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manaus
It's a major city.
That did not go where I thought it was going! I thought you were going to say that the pink dolphins, the sloth, etc, were all more valuable than $100 ever… nevermind you missed some meetings, time to sue!
The article directly addresses this concern:
"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."
unfortunately "de-identified" data is typically re-identified quite trivially. so i guess we just hope google keeps its promise, and is competent in its scrubbing.
Explicitly trying to re-identify data that has been de-identified is typically a fireable offence at FAANG.
Accidentally making a machine learning system that happens to (potentially) do it is a different matter.
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See the last 3 sentences of GP's post
> Google has promised to
This part is worrying.
Well, it also says that the data was already scrubbed. Arguments have been made that this is insufficient.
I have a bridge to sell you.
This is a fascinating story. Thanks for posting it.
That email you accidentally received really bothers me. I don't understand why a CS rep would get this invested to the point of wanting to cause you real harm. They're not the airline. The psychology is fascinating. There are people out there who feel like a mild short-term inconvenience to them where they have no stakes somehow justifies life-changing harm is kinda frightening, honestly.
I'm reminded of the Yahoo search data fiasco that was allegedly anonymized. Turns out, it wasn't so anonymous [1]. For one thing, people tend ed to search their home address. Whoops.
You mention writing style. We already have LLMs quite capable of copying a writing style. It's a natural extension to say we can fingerprint writing style too.
But here's another aspect. Imagine you're in a relationship with someone and you somehow fingerprint their personal data with a company. For example, you use their Netflix to like 5 very obscure movies, to the point where it's likely unique. Now imagine that Netflix's data gets released in an "anonymized" form and you can now find it based on those obscure likes. I can imagine many scenarios like this. And there's no text involved here at all.
[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/yahoos-gigantic-anonymized-u...
> I don't understand why a CS rep would get this invested to the point of wanting to cause you real harm
This is the kind of power tripping that easily corrupts people, especially those who don't have much power outside of work. The US national security apparatus is vast and powerful. Many people get giddy at the thought of inflicting punishment on those who "deserve" it. Act rude to a fast food worker, and you get spit in your food. Lots of people cheer the worker who spit in the food of a customer who is merely rude, impatient, or demanding. Or is guilty of being a cop, politician, rich, etc.
I can easily imagine the kind of CS rep who would delight in putting a customer who didn't just go along with things and spoke up for themselves... thats 'rude' and 'disrespectful' to some. Police are the most notorious for this kind of petty "you will respect my authority" but it is in every industry.
HN / hacker culture celebrates this in the 'Bastard Operator from Hell' [0], the sysop who will ruin your work and life with their IT wizardry, no matter if you're an intern or CEO, if they do not feel respected. Or if you interrupt their gaming with your support call.
[0] https://www.alnet.org/bofh/Bastard.html
I don't understand why a CS rep would get this invested to the point of wanting to cause you real harm.
Two possibilities come to mind... 1 - The CS rep has been instructed to do this. Scary, but corporate leaders can be assholes and wield lots of power within their orgs, so doesn't seem completely unlikely to me.
2 - The CS was just a dick.
Frankly, given the behavior of various SuperMegaCorps over the past few decades, I'm going with #1.
3- The CS rep tought that would make them more favourable to their manager.
... or frustrated. "I have my quota of jiras to meet, and this person is taking up too much of my time when it was such a simple issue which no one complains about". Not a good customer service mindset, but frustration happens.
Just a reminder that about 40% of the email conversations in the last 20 years are already in Google’s possession with the identifying data. (About another 40% are in Microsoft’s.)
If they want to do that they already can, thanks to the public’s overwhelming appetite for “FREE” overriding every single other possible concern.
Which is funny to point out on a post about Spirit, since that was an airline built to serve the customers for whom cheapness was the overwhelming single concern.
> the public’s overwhelming appetite for “FREE”
In the early pioneering days of the commercialized Internet, email addresses were inextricably linked to your ISP. You paid for an ISP connection and you got an email box, with MTA and MUA service to match. You were reluctant to switch or leave your ISP, because that also meant leaving behind your email address. Of course, a minority of nerds got around this with their own domains, etc.
However, it seems that Google, AOL, Yahoo!, Hotmail, and other players got into providing free email services and eventually grew into giants that supplanted every other MTA service. This was not an accident and it was not merely our appetite for “FREE” but it was a very calculated plan by the industry. Those early ISPs did not have a business model that admitted monetizing our private data; they seemed to have a more respectful attitude for keeping it private. Perhaps that was a result of being telecommunications-based companies, rather than advertising or entertainment.
If a service like email provides such endless treasure troves of personal data, including a social graph and glimpses into our private daily lives, why not provide it for free and monetize opportunistically on the data itself? The free email services killed the paid services, not by being better or cheaper, but by being bigger, centralized, and more persistent. The main reason I signed up for Yahoo! was because it would be an utterly stable presence. I saw my parents and others so hopelessly attached to an ISP-based email, but I couldn't end up like that.
After streaks of losing my home and non-payment of bills and moving around over decades, the most stable point of contact for me has been a "free" email address.
> why not provide it for free and monetize opportunistically on the data itself?
Interesting proposition. It seems to me like the first round of this (Hotmail, Yahoo, the free types of accounts AOL offered, Juno, etc) was not about monetizing the data, but about acquiring sticky loyal traffic for their overall portals, to monetize with ads. Remember in the early days you'd log into Yahoo or whatever and the first thing you'd see was your inbox, then later on all these services added a welcome page that would have a bunch of "news/sports/entertainment" type stories, ads, and links to more Yahoo! services. Email was being used then as a loss leader to guarantee you'll be returning several times a week minimum.
I believe it was Google who broke the seal on reading our email to show us targeted ads.
I hear what you're saying that especially for those who go through exceptional circumstances, a free email untethered to any billing account is useful.[1] But it's still sad to me that that concept - admittedly very compelling to Gen-X and millennials who were going through the chaos of college in the 90s and 2000s when email was becoming popular - ended up cementing this idea forever. Both by establishing these identities on a few popular commercial domains like gmail.com, hotmail.com, and yahoo.com, and by setting the expectation that "email shouldn't cost even $1 a year." Most of us pay $60-100 a month for an ISP and another $60-100 a month for a cell phone plan, and $0 of that money pays for email.
[1] I'd argue that for everyone fortunate enough to have more stability of accounts, homes and such, the "moving" problems could have been easily solved by a regulation kind of like cell phone number portability, which shockingly worked out quite well.
Speaking from the perspective of someone who experienced the beginning of the Internet in one of the places where it began...
The real difference with phones is that they come with their own network, which vaguely incorporates the internetworking protocols. In the pioneering days of the internet, the ISP was the closest thing to you which was actually connected to the Internet. Early email paid attention to store-and-forward protocols, nowadays mailing lists are forced to use DKIM in order to deliver to the large ESPs and can't get it right.
The availability of network connectivity is much more pervasive today, clearly store-and-forward has mostly gone away. (Not to be confused with MTA-MTA hops, although these days most of my mail has exactly one hop on the actual Internet, again demonstrating the pervasiveness of connectivity.)
Not sure about Google and Microsoft, but Facebook was (dunno if they're still in the phone business) the de facto ISP for large numbers of people in the third world.
- if they could put me on the no-fly list. -
ahhh, there seems to be different no-fly lists? The one Im aware of is the one for terrorists and moneylaunderers, and usually they will not tell you who put you on that list :-D
There are different no fly lists. Airlines maintain their own list of people they’ve banned from their planes.
There is "the" no-fly list maintained by the government, which is nominally for people who are too dangerous to be allowed on an airplane, yet not dangerous enough to charge criminally.
But each airline also maintains their own internal no-fly list for people they prefer to no longer have as customers, for whatever reason. You might end up on this for some abuse of the system that doesn't pose any sort of safety risk, so the government doesn't care, but the airline doesn't like. For example, excessively doing hidden-city ticketing (where you book a flight with a connection, then skip the second leg of the trip, because weird pricing rules make it cheaper than just booking a ticket to the connecting city) can get you banned from the airline, but the government would be completely uninterested.
This is insane entitlement. You sued them because you landed at an alternate airport in a country you were visiting.
> they could do that with that email chain
Now think about all the Gmail data Google has.
Well at least you didn't land in the middle of nowhere. Nokia had the worlds largest cell phone factory there back in the day.
And this is why data protection laws, like the (imperfect) EU ones that are so lamented here on HN, are necessary.
That's because they're seemingly perfunctory. What's worse than no law is a bad one that doesn't do anything but make you feel like something is actually being done.
Sounds like you should have got the travel insurance
This is why I get bad vibes any time I hit a cloudflare interstitial page. If you ever piss them off it would be trivial to cut you off from most of the internet.
FWIW the article says:
> deidentified data
I'm not sure I follow your argument. The privacy abuse already happened. The data is already there. And it was the airline that did it, not a tech giant who just wants to train a bunch of MLs.
Surely if this is the scenario you're worrying about, and you accept the lack of regulatory protections, Google buying Spirit's data is a good thing, right? Much better them than the airlines who you already know to be corrupt?
Manny retail industries already share lists of "troublesome" customers (trouble = anything from too many returns to lawsuit-happy to friendly fraud). Not sure this is a new concern..
Dude you got a free once in a lifetime opportunity to see the Amazon and Rio Negro. You saw pink dolphins. I think you made out pretty well. I would have taken the $100 and made peace.... Yeesh
Google will now connect your HN username to your Spirit customer service records.
I never understood this attitude, like I feel like being able to fly in airplane is one of the most amazing human achievements, yet people will try and save down to the dollar booking a flight like it was breakfast at Dennys, and come out huffing and puffing as soon as anything goes wrong demanding their money back. Airlines like Spirit catered to the worse of these type of customers.
That’s a bit unfair. They also catered to broke people who weren’t crazy or argumentative. On a planeload of 100 people, there must have been 60 of them at least who were just broke. Or on some routes, Spirit was the only carrier with a direct flight so they were just normal people who wanted to get to a certain place efficiently (Hi, that’s me, I flew them for this reason). Keep in mind Spirit had an excellent safety record, too, so airline choice in this case was primarily a question of having luxuries or not.
Did you end up getting more than $100?
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I think you might have missed the deidentification piece?
Not trying to be snarky, and perhaps it wasn't well stated, but the last paragraph I said I'm concerned about identification via my writing style. If they have my emails, they would have my writing style. It doesn't have to be tied to PII there, they can cross reference it with my blog. I'm speculating because I read that you can identify people by a few sentences of their writing.
"Deidentification" seems really murky and imprecise at best.
Reidentification via writing style is definitely possible, and I doubt the vendor will modify things in a way sufficient to handle that.
But I think this is a place where we should apply bounded distrust: there are lots of places where we should distrust Google, but reidentifying people in an explicitly deidentified dataset isn't one of them.
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>murky
Maybe, a little. Top comment on an old HN stylometry tool:
https://antirez.com/hnstyle ). Anyway imagine Google’s funding + data + new techniques—shouldn’t be terribly murky these days.
You have to trust that this really "deidentifies". Time and time again it was shown, that the measures taken were not enough to anonymize.
E.g. the parent wrote that he fears, he could be identified by his writing style, which is totally plausible. How would you "deidentify" this?
Even if they follow to the letter a deidentification process, Google and Meta have so much data about individuals that re-identification shouldn't be very hard for the majority of airline passengers' data they put their hands on.
Of course, takes a lot more effort than not doing proper deindetification in the first place but if they wanted to appear like caring about data privacy they still have enough data points to correlate the sets later on (and/or over time).
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Even before LLMs there were multiple papers written about ways to to reidentify people with ML and other statistical analysis. It is probably now even more trivial especially if you are Google.
No such animal.
I have a bridge for sale, hardly seen use, pay me ${money} and you can collect it in New York City. Interested?
> But, this is the kind of information I'm worried about when a vendor sells my data
Don't worry. Spirit probably lost all of the emails from the customers (or they were devnulled) and 90% of the data is probably autoresponder messages promising the company would respond.
The other 10% was probably the meme collection of the executive management team.
> 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
How can I help them accomplish this goal?