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Comment by limagnolia | Hacker News Reader

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."

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"De-identified" data is trivially easy to re-identify, especially by google.

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/09/technology/a-face-is-expo...

Sure, you can argue that its a bad deal, shouldn't be allowed period, etc. But that is a different argument than saying that there is no scrutiny.

The argument is that the scrutiny is in practice not sufficient, as usual in these cases.

The argument generally doesn't demonstrate that. The argument generally goes:

1. Google could do it.

2. <This space is intentionally left blank>

3. Therefore, Google is doing it!

(Step 2 needs to be filled in a bit for it to be a good argument. Generally, analogies don't quite make the cut.)

You are ignoring the value of previous experience:

Please replace 'Google' with 'Profit-driven legal entity in the USA' and reread your argument.

The parent is making an assumption, based on past experience, but is also Most Likely correct.

At the risk of posting without adding anything substantive, I find this an exceedingly convincing argument.

Insufficient scrutiny would be more apt.

Sounds like a case of “there’s not enough scrutiny unless the decision ends up agreeing with my position”

Specially when you have a list of flights, people on board, issues, etc... The fact that they are specifically tellling people to not worry about that is also a red flag for me. They know what they'd worry about if they were the affected ones.

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.

Yes, 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.

Not 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.

Google 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.

Yes, you can increase accuracy. However, I always turn it off and still get an accuracy of a few meters, which is plenty accurate nearly all practical purposes. Even in cities.

The difference used to be larger, but with the multitude of satellite systems now available and the advancements in receivers the difference is way less than it used to be.

> Now I know you get tracked by the celltowers anyway

Yes, but theGoog doesn't own that data. By having all of theGoogOS devices scanning and reporting back directly to theGoog, theGoog gets that data for free. Plus, all of the other info it can hoover up that the cell towers would not have access.

Surely all this will take is asking the trained LLM to deidentify it lol

The article claims it has already been removed, that Google is committing to remove anything leftover that they find.

You can argue that its a bad deal, shouldn't be allowed period, etc. But that is a different argument than saying that there is no scrutiny.

Gemini, scrub this text for PII, make no mistake!

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

"cookie sync" is the internal lingo

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.

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.

pinky promise?

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