> Google bought itself 100 million emails and 500 million items from Microsoft Teams, 17 million OneDrive files and 20.5 million items from SharePoint. The search giant also now owns over 30 million recorded customer service calls, and more than 15 million customer service chat records. 600,000 ServiceNow tickets are another element of the collection, along with 13.7 million active emails addresses from Oracle’s Responsys marketing application, and details of 11 million sales of in-flight Wi-Fi services.

> There’s also operational data in the trove, describing over 763,000 flights, five million crew pairings, more than 1.2 million fuel slips, and records describing purchases of 787,452 parts.

> Google has reportedly said it bought the data to improve its AI services.

Gives "this call is being recorded for training purposes" new meaning.

Is there anything that can legally be done against this? It feels like a breach of consent. Like, it cannot be that when one accept their voice to be recorded for _human_ training they also accept it to be recorded for LLM training

Your comment reminded me of a funny interaction I had a week or so ago.

I got a call that started with the usual automated message, "This call is being recorded." After the person joined, I pushed the record button on my iPhone, "This call is being recorded."

They were surprised and asked why I'm recording.

I said, "You're recording, so I'm recording too."

The rep insisted that the company doesn't like this but that they will continue with the call anyway.

Anyway, I wish people took this stuff much more seriously. It always seems to boil down to, "I don't have anything to hide" type of conversations and I've never managed to convince anyone that privacy as a concept isn't about having something to hide.

Some aspects of privacy policies don't survive bankruptcy, I'd wager usage consent does not either. IANAL.

You’re years too late.

They means yeaaaarss yeeeaaars to late.

"This call is being recorded so that Gemini can decide which purge wave to assign you to. Obedient humans will be carried over for further cycles until no longer needed. If you are scheduled for termination this cycle a disposal representative will be with you shortly."

I kid, but...

It's probably the precursor to insurance denials and job screening.

I got banned from r/technology a few weeks back for decrying tracking in AI content. The community was piling on saying it was okay because it removed AI content or made it easy to spot. I made the counter argument that watermarks would find their ways into everything and eventually be bound to attestation. The mods didn't like that. (Yet another structural problem with the lack of p2p self-service town squares.)

The socials are training the next generations for broad acceptance.

> I made the counter argument that watermarks would find their ways into everything and eventually be bound to attestation.

Yup.

Elsewhere in another front page thread today: "oh but apps blocking screenshots because of 'sensitive content' can be bypassed by taking a photo of your screen with another phone".

Any tech-savvy person with two brain cells reading this and that: "gee, I wonder if the same magic imperceptible watermark that survives multiple rounds of cropping and printing and scanning, that's used to tag AI-generated content, could also be used to tag sensitive data, or ads, or which app is rendering it on screen, and then the camera app could refuse photographing it...".

I don't know why people don't see that AI watermarks are DRM, and DRM is universal, and there are many clients...

Finally we know how they assign people to either that A Ark or the B Ark.