The company died, the inbox got sold
Google has won a bankruptcy auction for the internal data of a collapsed airline: staff emails, Teams threads, payroll, personnel files back to 1986. The approval hearing was due today and has just been pushed to September after the flight attendants objected.
- 01
Google wins the auction for Spirit Airlines' internal data, then the hearing is pulled
A filing on 14 August named Google as the winning bidder for the collapsed airline's business data at about 10 million dollars, covering roughly 100 million staff emails, 500 million Teams messages, spreadsheets, calendars, some 3.4 million payroll records and employee files going back to 1986, for product development and AI training. Customer and loyalty records are excluded, and a scrubbing firm chosen by Google is meant to strip personal details before anything is handed over. The flight attendants' union objected and the approval hearing set for today has moved to 9 September, its argument being that the agreement requires the links between datasets to be preserved, which is the thing that makes de-identified records re-identifiable.
Association of Flight Attendants-CWA - 02
OpenAI's president publishes a ten-point security list and a window he cannot date
Greg Brockman posted The Defender's Window on 17 August, arguing there is a period, running now, in which defenders can adopt AI security tooling before attackers have the equivalent widely to hand. The ten steps mostly come down to giving your security people an agent, pointing it at your own systems, and actually working through the backlog it produces rather than filing it. His worked example is his own personal website: thirteen vulnerabilities found in fifteen minutes and fixed in about an hour.
OpenAI - 03
Millions of corporate directory records for sale, taken through logins rather than a breach
A seller using the name TheHatman is advertising around 3.64 million employee records pulled from corporate Microsoft Azure and Entra ID tenants, with McDonald's, Vodafone, Tata Consultancy, HCL, Kyndryl, IHG and Gap named across the listings. The claimed method is password spraying and MFA fatigue using stolen credentials, so nothing was broken at Microsoft's end: the tenants were logged into. Gap and TCS both say they have found no evidence of a compromise and that the material is several years old, while researchers who examined the dumps say the fields match genuine directory exports.
BleepingComputer - 04
ChatGPT starts estimating how old you are and acting on the answer
The global rollout of ChatGPT for Teens began on 18 August and OpenAI expects it to finish within a fortnight, with the EU following later to account for local requirements. Anyone who states an age of 13 to 17 lands in it, and so does anyone the age-prediction system judges to be under 18 from signals such as the topics raised, the time of day the account is used and how long it has existed. In that mode the assistant drops romantic language and terms of endearment and is pushed harder to deny having feelings or consciousness.
OpenAI - 05
Hollywood and TikTok's owner agree guardrails instead of a licence
The Motion Picture Association and ByteDance signed a memorandum of understanding on 17 August covering the Seedance video and Seedream image models and their use across TikTok, CapCut and Dreamina. It follows the cease-and-desist the MPA sent in February, after Seedance 2.0 users started producing clips riffing on Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. No money changes hands and no catalogue is licensed, so what the studios have bought here is blocking rather than payment, which is worth noting if you have ever been told that AI video firms will end up paying rights holders.
MPA and ByteDance - 06
Reddit starts reading its own threads aloud, with the label attached
From 17 August on the web, and the following day on iOS and Android, Reddit is testing a Play mode that turns eligible text posts and their replies into short videos read by AI voices, with the words appearing in sync. Each carries the line "Real conversation voiced by AI" and the original thread stays as it was. The test is English-only across a limited set of communities, and the motive is not hidden: narrated Reddit-story channels on TikTok and YouTube pull tens of millions of views a month that Reddit earns nothing from.
TechRepublic
Spirit stopped flying in May. Its inbox did not stop existing. The interesting part of this auction is what was not in it: the customer list, the loyalty database, the 97.5 million passengers, all carved out and protected. What Google actually bid for was the boring interior of a company that no longer exists. Staff emails. Teams threads. Spreadsheets nobody outside the finance team ever opened. Personnel files going back to 1986. Ten million dollars, for the paperwork of a failure. From direct experience in construction I understand exactly why that is the valuable half. The manuals tell you how a job was supposed to go. The messages tell you how it went, who spotted the problem, who was overruled, and what it cost, and no functioning business will ever sell you that.
The union's objection is the sharper thing, though. Spirit says the records will be de-identified, but the sale agreement requires the links between datasets to be kept intact, and once you can join payroll to rota to email thread, an anonymous record stops being anonymous with about ten minutes of effort. Which brings it to a firm of twelve. Every contract you have signed with a software supplier answers what happens to your data if you leave. Almost none of them answer what happens if they go under, and insolvency is not a data breach, it is an asset sale supervised by a court that is trying to pay creditors. Your own inbox, your own site photos, your own price build-ups sitting in some subcontractor management tool: if that company fails, none of that is protected by the promise on their website, because the website will belong to someone else too.
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