Free Republic

Did you ever fly on Spirit Airlines? Or work there? Or send an email to someone who worked there? Then your information will soon be feeding Google’s artificial intelligence model. The discount airline halted all operations in May, and it’s been selling off its remaining assets through the bankruptcy process ever since. While most of that is planes, equipment, and real estate, there’s other things that are valuable, too. It was disclosed late Monday that the company agreed to sell its data to Google for $10 million. That includes emails and internal communications, spreadsheets, transactions with the public including bookings...

Comment According to an old Chinese proverb: "When a wise man points at the Moon, an idiot looks at his finger." Google may have been hoping that you were examining a finger, not reading a Quartz story yesterday, which reveals how Android phones send location data to Google without you even knowing it. Google received the data even if you didn't have a SIM card in your phone, and everything else was turned off. It's such an old story, you'll fall asleep reading it, so please don't, urged one blue-ticked tweeter. Nobody suspected Google did this practice – and Google...

October 26, 2006 A New Campaign Tactic: Manipulating Google Data By TOM ZELLER Jr. If things go as planned for liberal bloggers in the next few weeks, searching Google for “Jon Kyl,” the Republican senator from Arizona now running for re-election, will produce high among the returns a link to an April 13 article from The Phoenix New Times, an alternative weekly.Mr. Kyl “has spent his time in Washington kowtowing to the Bush administration and the radical right,” the article suggests, “very often to the detriment of Arizonans.”Searching Google for “Peter King,” the Republican congressman from Long Island, would bring...