Selling a dead startup's Slack breaks a basic privacy promise
Every privacy program I've helped run starts with purpose limitation. Data collected so people can do their jobs shouldn't quietly become training fuel for someone else's model. Yet SimpleClosure and Sunset now broker dead startups' Slack histories and inboxes to AI labs, and Google paid $10 million for Spirit Airlines' emails and Teams messages. Vendors say they scrub personal data, but that won't reliably catch the doctor appointments and school pickups buried in calendars. If you're on the buying side, your provenance story just got harder to defend. Would your AI governance committee approve a dataset whose authors never consented?
Source: AI labs are buying data from dead startups to train their models (MIT Technology Review)