Last Friday, Google won an auction to acquire a huge amount of Spirit Airlines data.

The data doesn’t include personal information or customer data, but instead nearly covers the airline's entire employment and workplace record.

To ensure that no individual can be identified in the dataset, Google agreed to use a court-appointed ombudsman to oversee a process to strip any personally identifying information (PII) from the data before it’s transferred to Google. Under the deal, Google agreed to maintain the data in this de-identified form and to never intentionally re-identify the data. And if Google sells access to the data, third parties would supposedly be bound by the same terms.

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The Federal Communications Commission last week eliminated the gigabit speed goal established during the Biden administration and declared that current levels of broadband deployment in the US are acceptable. Though fiber networks have routinely offered such speeds for years, the FCC said the gigabit speed goal is not "technologically neutral," suggesting that it isn't fair to other, slower technologies.

In 2024, the FCC raised its broadband benchmark to 100Mbps downstream and 20Mbps upstream, setting the new standard by which to judge whether deployment is reasonable and timely. The FCC at the time also set a long-term speed goal of 1Gbps download speeds paired with 500Mbps upload speeds, saying it would use the goal “as a guidepost for evaluating our efforts to encourage deployment.”

Republican Brendan Carr, who is now the FCC chairman, never liked that long-term goal. He proposed abolishing it last year, and the change was finalized on August 14 in the FCC's latest broadband deployment report. The reports are mandated by Section 706 of the Telecommunications Act.

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