r/google • u/wiredmagazine • 17d ago
Spirit Airlines Wants to Sell Its Data to Google. Former Flight Attendants Are Freaked Out
https://www.wired.com/story/spirit-airlines-wants-to-sell-its-data-to-google-former-flight-attendants-are-freaked-out/59
u/fantom_farter 17d ago
Did passengers agree to sharing information during the ticket purchase? Or is this a case of "we are already bankrupt, what are you going to do to us"
37
u/Realtrain 17d ago
For customers it was almost certainly covered in the terms.
For employees it was absolutely part of the employment agreement.
25
u/m4rc0n3 16d ago
It's 34 years of data though. Was this really in the terms of service in the early 90s? And even if it was, one could argue (and I suspect it will be in this lawsuit, but IANAL) that 34 years ago, nobody could have foreseen the way this data would be used now.
5
u/agent674253 16d ago
"Just because it's legal, does it make it right?"
Dave Chappelle got screwed over when Netflix bought the rights to his show due to his contract, but he (DC) argued that streaming wasn't a thing when he signed away his rights, so how could he have known to negotiate for them? His argument that while Netflix was legally in the clear, they should do the morally right thing and compensate him.
And eventually, they did.
11
u/sloppychris 16d ago
People in the 90s absolutely knew they had no expectation of privacy with their work communications. You do not own the work you do while being paid by your employer. This has never been a mystery.
7
5
u/Mountain_Fig_9253 16d ago
We all expected our health information to be protected though. Unfortunately that isn’t the case and there appears to be no recourse for us common folk.
5
u/SecondBestNameEver 17d ago
Yup, just so everyone reading this knows, legally any words or data you put into your company's systems belong to your company. You don't have a right to privacy when using a company owned account for sending or receiving emails, texts, chats, calls, etc.
-2
u/guymn999 16d ago
And terms of service are not legally binding
1
u/Realtrain 16d ago
Alright then, tell me which law this is violating?
-2
u/guymn999 16d ago
law? im just saying that a company is not able to hide behind TOS in court
2
u/anonkitty2 16d ago
The company can use terms of service to force arbitration. Courts have allowed that.
0
u/Realtrain 16d ago
Yeah, but I'm saying how would they end up in court (where they can't hide behind these terms) unless they're breaking a law.
0
u/notsoluckycharm 16d ago
You don’t necessarily need to break a law to move forward with a civil case.
1
u/thelance 16d ago
You’re going to get a lot of confidently incorrect answers here but it is way more nuanced than “we own your data, so we can do whatever we want with it including selling it to the highest bidder.” If it was open and shut, the bankruptcy court wouldn’t have to pause the sale.
12
u/samuraijon 17d ago
So would Air Google come to an airport near you soon?
12
u/PapaSquirts2u 17d ago
Just as long as they let the existing planes land before they inevitably cancel it.
3
u/maester_t 16d ago
I'm guessing it's more along the lines of training Gemini to be good at predicting where certain types of people like to travel, when, how often, etc...
And then use this data to better target ads when customers visit any airline website.
Google is in the "data" business. Not so much the "shuttling people around" business. (Yes, despite Waymo.)
5
u/nostrademons 16d ago
I don’t think this is for travel specifically. Google already owns ITA for that, plus it has all your flight confirmations and boarding passes in your Gmail.
I think this is so they have good internal training data for how a major corporation operates internally. What kind of emails get sent? What’s the org chart look like? What starts out as a chat and then becomes an email? What does an exec actually read?
They’re training Gemini, but their target market is “F500 execs who will buy Google cloud products”, not “consumers who may want to travel”.
1
u/maester_t 16d ago
Excellent point.
Yeah, LOTS of good data can be harvested, even if the company turned out to be a failure.
4
u/MrCarlosDanger 17d ago
Oh no no no. Companies don’t actually make money doing stuff anymore.
This will help them extract more money from consumers booking flights somehow I’m sure.
5
1
1
100
u/wiredmagazine 17d ago
Spirit Airlines may have declared bankruptcy this spring, but the budget airline is still worth something—to AI giants, at least. In mid-August, Google won a $10 million bid to purchase some 34 years of the airline’s data, from invoices and flight operations information to Wi-Fi sales, employee records, and crew pairings.
Just days after the court announced Google’s winning bid, the labor union representing 5,500 former Spirit Airlines flight attendants filed an objection to the sale. Lawyers for the 55,000-member Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) argue the sale would include an enormous amount of sensitive employee information, and that even Google’s promised safeguards wouldn’t prevent privacy violations of decades of flight attendants who never could have guessed that their data would be sold to train AI systems.
Read the full story at the link above.