Spirit was a low-cost U.S. airline that recently ceased operations.
Google buys crashed airline Spirit’s data at auction, because AI
$10 million buys over 100 million emails, 30 million recorded phone calls, reams of stuff from Teams, Oracle, and SAP
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.
But who’s to say whether google or some future accessor/buyer won’t use voice recognition? (Not to mention that there are many purely logical tools/methods re-identify.)
It is arguable that this is abusive and should be illegal.
They always say that calls are recorded for “quality and training purposes” (or similar wording) and in some industries calls are recorded for legitimate purposes (e.g. where a dispute about what was said would be highly significant).
However “calls are recorded as a company asset to be flogged off when the company goes tits-up” seems somewhat dubious at least.
They just didn’t specifically say: “training the AI of the highest bidder”.
In a court filing Tuesday, the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), a collective bargaining unit that represents Spirit workers, argued that Google relied on consumer protection laws to guarantee the data wouldn’t contain personally identifying information (PII). However, those laws do not cover worker confidentiality, and that allegedly leaves a huge privacy loophole in Google’s deal, especially when you consider that the tech giant is buying worker data, not consumer data.
Flight attendants freaked out that Google is buying tons of Spirit employee data - Ars Technica
When you buy the recordings of customer service calls, you are buying both. It is potentially a breach of privacy both of the employee and of the customer.