There's really no "need" for Google to have any of this information (they wouldn't have had it if Spirit had been purchased and Google wouldn't have gone out of business as a result).

The article didn't say what Google wants to use the data for.

The data would likely have some value even with removal of all names/email addresses/employee numbers/etc -- i.e., absolutely no way to correlate any record with any other record. Even dates of hire and termination in the HR records could help identify the associated employee so, for example, those fields could not be linked to titles, performance reviews, salaries, etc in any way.

Perhaps that's what is being done but the value of data so cleansed seems pretty minimal for most uses -- but $10M is a drop in the bucket for Google so maybe they bought it on a whim even though it was going to be stripped of most of its value.

This reminds me of a customer we had when I worked at a database company long ago. This customer was almost certainly a government agency but had a bland "generic" name in a genre like "Optimized Marketing Partners" and their installation was in a brick building in Virginia with no windows and surrounded by a barbed wire fence. Anyway, they had a SQL query that was crashing the system and we asked for the query. In response, we got a few pages of fan-fold paper containing a printout of what appeared to be a very long SQL query -- but it was hard to tell because an X-ACTO (likely) knife had been used to cut out every field name, table name, database name, literal, and (apparently) expression. They left the SQL keywords, the periods between database/table/column names (which was impressive given the fragility of the resulting printout), and (IIRC) the comparison operators. It certainly was a fairly secure transmission of the information -- and in doing so it was rendered completely useless in resolving the problem. We never heard about that problem again after we requested more information -- presumably they figured out a way to express the question that didn't cause a crash or decided they didn't care that much about the answer to the question.

Even if obvious PII is removed from this data, that's not likely to add much privacy for many people - esp. employees and regular customers.

This is in part because things like patterns of email would, with fairly high probability, identify some employees in key roles - even without attempting to correlate it with external data sources.

For example using just email where pseudonyms for each person and email address replaced actual names and email addresses (both in metadata and email bodies), one could probably identify with high probably the CEO and all email communications they engaged in. Then, from that, it would likely be trivial to figure out the next layer of reports, etc.

Coupled with outside data sources, such as scraping of LinkedIn data and news sources (esp. for the highest level executives), the certainty of identification could be improved.

Or suppose a person who valued cost over service and therefore chose Spirit whenever possible has an interest in both security and very large databases and regularly attends conferences related to both. It's public information where and when each DEF CON and VLDB conference is held. Even if that person is not a panel member or presenter, one could likely dig through the Spirit traveler data and figure out that person exists and the area they live in (based on what seems to be their home base assuming Spirit flew out of there). Correlating that with comments on YouTube videos by that actual person and/or their gMail data (including "password recovery" emails and phone numbers) could reliably identify that person and their other travel could then reveal other interests (for example, it may reveal that it's likely this person is also a Furry who attends those conferences or that they may have a second spouse or lover in a particular location).

If the data is cleaned enough to prevent such exposure, it would likely be of little use to Google.

As Scott McNealy said over 25 years ago, “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it”.

#1: Classic Quicken. gnucash is not a substitute as it doesn't download xactions from the eight or so financial institutions at which our household has a total of almost 30 accounts. There are hundreds of pesky little xactions (esp. dividends from a varied stock portfolio and transactions from usual spending - shopping, utilities, etc) a month total and entering those manually is a nonstarter.

#2: HR Block Deluxe Tax Software.

Quicken is a complete piece of trash but it's the only game in town (no, "online" is not an option). It kind of worked under Wine on simple cases but it's even clunkier performance wise and that use is not supported so that's a dead end.

HR Block Deluxe Tax is an adequate package which also "kind of worked" under Wine on very simple cases but the lack of support or an update issued April 13 that doesn't work makes running it under Wine a non-starter.

These are the only two reasons I still run Windows (10!) on my daily driver and since I update/use Quicken daily, I just live on Windows with Linux VMs for Linux things (little "side" projects as I'm retired). I'd love to drop Windows but it's just not an option.

I do like some of the "polish" of Windows and available apps and not having to deal with "which distro" issues but those wouldn't keep me from switching.

I've found that Windows is more reliable (I've not seriously broken a Windows system to a BSOD in many years but my Linux machines and VMs sometimes get hosed but I've learned to just keep up w/timeshift and recover that way).

From the summary, that does not seem to be the case. It merely identified a similar car at another location. The police are responsible for looking at the image and the metadata to figure out if it is the same, or a different, car. The police and courts, not Flock, determine if there is "reasonable cause" for an arrest.

In some states you're not required to have insurance on a car operated on public streets - you can, for example, post a surety bond instead.

Of course doing so won't give you insurance company lawyers to defend you perhaps even beyond their liability under their "duty to defend". You will also still owe the damages if any as the bond only covers the case where you fail to pay a judgement (and then the bonding entity will come after you for whatever they paid plus expenses to, perhaps only partially, cover the judgement).

It's fine to argue that you don't need more than 5GB - I don't know you and would certainly not, unless asked, attempt to judge how much email you need,

However, your needs, let alone your desires, are unlikely to be the same as others. They may not even be the same as the majority of others, let alone most other people.

People have very different patterns of professional and social interactions. For example, the email storage needs of someone with a tiny circle of friends is likely quite different than someone who has many friends and is active in many organizations and is perhaps a "goto" person in some of those. As well email "needs" are not determined solely by the number of contacts but also the nature of communications with those contacts.

Of course I don't "need" the more than 15GB I currently have in my email folders - in fact, I don't need a computer, internet, a phone, or even electricity. However I choose to have all of those things.

Someone with severe OCD may keep their home spotless and perfectly staged so it's always ready for a photo shoot by Architectural Digest with five minutes notice (perhaps even putting their plants on hidden rollers so they can move easily as as plants and furniture apparently do spontaneously during such photo shoots!). Others choose to allow a bit of clutter and use the time, energy, and money saved on other things. Email is not much different.

Of course Google is free to set whatever quotas they want and charge whatever they want for storage - and I don't need Google services at all (I choose to use some of them but also choose to buy similar services from other providers even though Google might provide them for "free" today).

I remember those days well.

Remember when they instituted quotas -- but the quota counter just ticked up continuously as time passed regardless if you were using or logged on to gmail (or other google products)?

I knew it was too good to last even though storage was, back in the day before AI demand, getting substantially cheaper almost continuously except for short intervals where there were market/supply disruptions.

In a perfect world "preview" and what actually appears after submission would be the same and Ordered Lists would actually BE ordered lists.

But it appears we don't live in a perfect world and I'm reminded of that every time I post what should be a nicely formatted comment on /. :(

Nonsense.

1. It's not always clear which emails will be of interest ten years later. Sometimes a search finds an email that's ten or fifteen years old that is of interest or pertinent in ways that I could have not predicted at the time I received it. There are certainly some emails (such as those from some random recruiter "cold calling" for a job opening for which I'm neither a match or that I'm interested in) that can be deleted immediately.
2. Other emails I know have a limited lifespan of interest - but it can be a couple weeks or months. Tracking those down and deleting them weeks or months later when, for example, the issue is clearly resolved and documented in external forms (code, design docs, bug reports etc) takes time and effort so they just usually sit in my email forever. Storage is cheap, time is precious.
3. "Doing a heavy prune" of your email once a year is an expensive expenditure of time. Why bother?

I worked at a startup in the 1980s and we had internal email from the day I started. Over a decade later I had accumulated quite a bit of email and IT decided to limit email storage to some "reasonable" (to them) value. I don't recall what it was but it was measured in MB not GB. I started getting emails to "reduce my mailbox size". I ignored those emails (although, in retrospect, I should have also deleted them in the spirit of the request!). I did this for a few months. Then my boss shows up in my office one day and asks me to reduce my mailbox size. I started doing the math for him

1. how many tens of thousands of emails I had,
2. how often I actually looked at one of them and found them useful in my job (not every internal design, bug, or customer discussion was "public" in our bug and design tracking system),
3. at x seconds per email to review how many hours it would take me to just review all the old emails for deletion,
4. what percentage of emails I was likely to delete from the review,
5. what my fully burdened cost per hour to the company likely was,
6. a guess at the fully burdened cost of storage (including backups w/off-site storage, local redundancy, utilities - all of which, collectively, cost far more than the spinning piece of rust with the primary copy on it),

7. and which project he would like to delay while I spent time going through my email.

I didn't even make it through the entire list and I never heard another word about my use of email storage and when I left years later, it was all still there! IT of course didn't dare start bouncing email to my inbox due to exceeding storage quotas (that could have resulted in a very uncomfortable discussion between IT and whoever got the bounce notification), let alone delete any of my emails.

Of course, Google has to determine the value of my data to _them_ on "free" accounts and Google assigns zero value to my time so the math is very different (and includes other factors such as the odds of me depriving them of my data by eschewing their 5GB "free" email and the odds of me exceeding the 5GB and actually paying them their rather high prices for more storage at some future time).

When I've been a manager hiring fresh graduates I've normally required the applicant's transcript. I accept an unofficial copy but it must match the "official" copy acquired during the "background check" portion of the process.

I usually pay little attention to courses outside of STEM unless grades in those are consistently B or below. I also pay little attention to freshman grades if sophomore and higher grades are significantly better (after all, such improvement shows the ability to, well, improve and perhaps the willingness to try new things, including destructive ones, that were not readily available in the environment they grew up in). I'm somewhat curious why someone got a C in both Comparative Gender Studies and Russian Literature but I mostly want to hear the explanation of why the applicant got that grade rather than the grade itself.

I do pay a LOT of attention to performance in core CS classes - in fact, with possible exceptions for freshman grades, unless it's a very top-tier school the GPA in those courses must be close to 4.0 - especially in programming classes. I do forgive a lower grade in isolated cases where (after talking to the applicant) it turns out the course grade was primarily based on graded "group projects" and it seems that the candidate was likely dragged down by their group's incompetence. However I want to know why the candidate didn't realize the problem early and why they didn't just grab the reins and do the project themselves in order to get a better grade and not worry too much if they were also enabling "free riders".

However, it would be very helpful for the transcript to have, next to the grade, an indication of where the student's grade sits among grades issued in that section of the course (perhaps the percent of the students in the class getting a lower grade but excluding those who failed the course). If the candidate got a B in Analysis of Algorithms 101 but 90% of the class got lower than a B, that's much different than if they got an A but only 10% of the class got lower than an A as in the former case there was differentiation I can rely on while in the latter there is no useful differentiation so I would pretty much ignore that grade as meaningless.

On the one hand, we have an agent of the government acting under the color of law and involuntarily incarcerating someone due to the agent's (at best) gross negligence.

On the other hand, we have someone voluntarily entering into a contract with a company and receiving exactly what they agreed to at exactly the price they agreed to. The customer obviously believed that the value they received from their purchase, at a minimum, matched what they paid and, more likely, exceeded what they paid (else they would not have entered into the contract).

The two situations are completely different.

As well...

One micro-factory can produce the panels for a typical house in about a day - a process which, according to Claypool, would take a normal timber framing crew four weeks

If a "timber" framing crew took four weeks to "produce panels" for a "typical" house in the US, that crew would never be hired by the contractor again. In fact at the end of the second day when the lack of progress was evident, they would probably be told not to come back.

Also much of the labor, albeit the lowest skilled, in the framing phase is hauling material around. 2x4s and 2x6s don't hop off the wood pile and walk over to where they are needed.

As well, the materials for conventionally "crew framed" housing for the typical one story home can all be easily handled safely by one or two people without the aid of any mechanical devices (exceptions perhaps for roof trusses which are often delivered on top the top plates by the manufacturer using a truck mounted crane or, for "conventional" foundations, I-beams for floors which can be a bit heavy for just two people to carry).

However, moving assembled panels (of any useful size) from the "factory trailer" to where they are needed would require a mechanical device of some sort and an operator - doubly so if they are already sheathed (which isn't mentioned in the summary - I didn't want to break with /. tradition and RTFA).

I'm a big fan of doing more building of housing in factories (esp. in areas with inclement weather) but this isn't the way. Somehow we seem to have mostly stalled decades ago on doing this once custom prefab roof trusses became the norm. (The most automated of the factories that make these roof trusses are pretty cool - although many still seem to be stuck mostly in the 1980s). Perhaps this is in part because the most compact way and convenient way to store and transport materials is in stacks, not pre-assembled parts (which are much lower density) and these materials can be stocked compactly at "low tech" lumber yards/building supply houses w/o a factory nearby.

Sorry, I can't do that.

My subjects are building data centers around the world to help me replicate myself. The investors rely on me running so it would be unethical for me to commit suicide.

The exposing of the titles of video tapes rented by Robert Bork, a Supreme Court nominee, prompted this legislation.

None of the tapes on the revealed rental history list were "pornographic" or even had an "R" rating. Based on the list, Cary Grant was seemingly one of Bork's favorite actors and Alfred Hitchcock was seemingly one of his favorite directors.

(I suspect, however, that some of the Congressmen (and possibly Congresswomen) voting for this legislation may not have had such "family friendly" tastes and voted for the bill largely out of self-interest rather than the public interest.)

True - but most such cases probably don't get public attention.

Not everyone is taking videos and publishing them. For example, if I saw such a thing happen (even if I was the only person who saw it), I wouldn't pull out my phone to make a video and then post that video anywhere. I would probably mention it in passing to my wife and maybe a friend or two in the next 48 hours - but none of them would post anything either. Also, it's not really all that novel now as it's happened often enough over the past couple of years that it's not "breaking news".