Comment by limagnolia
1 day ago
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.
Modern corporations have learned that the best way to do shady things is to make it very clear that such things are against policy and absolutely forbidden, and then to also make it very clear that breaking policy is the only way to actually get your job done. That way they still get all the benefits of doing shady stuff, and if it ever comes to light then they can fire some scapegoats and explain that this was against policy and they'd never ever condone it.
2 replies →
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.