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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.
by elric 29d ago
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?
- warkdarrior 29d agoThe 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.
- MagicMoonlight 29d ago[dead]
- alberto-m 29d agoDid 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.
- hdgvhicv 29d agoAmerica believes in freedom for large companies to take personal data and make it their own, rather than individual feeedom
- andrekandre 29d agothis is the conceit of politicians/elites when they talk about "freedom" vs when we talk about it; its a nice dog-whistle that only they can hear the true meaning of
- Leynos 29d agoThis 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.
- layer8 29d agoIf this were a European company: That’s not how the GDPR works. You can only consent to specific purposes of using the data.
- Ekaros 29d agoMakes 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.
- woadwarrior01 29d agoIf 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.
- icantevenhold 29d agoNot really: https://noyb.eu/en/fines-resulting-noyb-litigation https://noyb.eu/en/fines-resulting-noyb-litigation Sure 50 M or even 1 B might be peanuts for faang but still there is real progress. Support Noyb at all costs
- tiahura 29d ago[flagged]
- elric 29d agoWhat a load of crap. Your liberty to swing your fist ends where my nose begins. What's "triggering" is when it hits my nose.
- left-struck 29d agoWhy 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.
- tiahura 29d agoBecause corporations are just a group of people.
- andsoitis 29d ago> Why should corporations have the same rights and freedoms as human beings? They don’t.
- newswasboring 29d agoExactly. Corporations have more rights. Also immunity from any real consequences, but that's mostly an enforcement thing.
- limagnolia 29d agoIt 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."
- malfist 29d agoI'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.
- elric 29d agoYes, the same google that has repeatedly, entirely "by accident", captured boatloads of wifi data with their wardriving vehicles (or google streetview or whatever it's called). They sure seem like a trustworthy bunch.
- maybewhenthesun 29d agoNot only those wardriving vehicles. They use everybody to scan the world's wifi networks. Well, except people like me who stubbornly turn off 'location accuracy' every time some app demands you turn it on. I don't know exactly what gets sent to google, but it's certainly enough to identify and track (retrospectively) a huge part of the world's population. Now I know you get tracked by the celltowers anyway, but still. Navigation works fine with the accuracy offered by just using GPS and it doesn't need all the wifi scanning, it's pure data harvesting.
- Atotalnoob 29d agoGoogle 100% was wardriving and all of your other items. However, you can increase gps accuracy using wifi. GPS is not that precise (part of which is government regulations) and WiFi does help immensely with accuracy.
- sailfast 29d agoNot 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.
- prepend 29d agoSince 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.
- ryandrake 29d agoThat'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.
- prepend 27d agoIt’s legal consent. It’s the version that matters if you’re trying to limit what your employer can do with everything you write at work. And sufficient to allow anything in the US, and many other countries. I disagree with this and think it’s a bad thing. If I founded a company, I would explicitly disallow this and make communications private and not resellable. But it exists, sadly.
- alerighi 29d agoI 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.
- Tangurena2 29d ago> 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.
- preg_match 29d agoUsually 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.