Google's $10 million purchase of bankrupt Spirit Airlines' worker data alarms flight attendants
Google won a bankruptcy auction to buy a massive trove of former Spirit Airlines employee data for $10 million, and the flight attendants' union is now asking a court to block the sale unless workers get the same privacy protections as customers.
After Spirit Airlines collapsed into bankruptcy, the carrier auctioned off a large dataset to the highest bidder, with Google ultimately winning by offering $10 million. The dataset excludes customer information but covers decades of employment records, including roughly 100 million employee emails, HR files, payroll data, and information tracking worker behavior and productivity.
To prevent individuals from being identified, Google agreed to have a court-appointed overseer manage a process stripping personal identifiers before the data reaches the company, and it committed never to intentionally re-identify anyone. However, these safeguards largely rely on consumer protection laws that don't extend to employee confidentiality.
Union pushes back
The Association of Flight Attendants, which represents Spirit workers, filed an objection arguing that the deal's privacy protections were built around consumers even though the data is overwhelmingly employee-related, leaving the more sensitive material less protected than the less sensitive material. The union said removing names doesn't make records like disciplinary letters, training deficiencies, or internal messages about management any less confidential.
The AFA also warned that Google could potentially combine the worker data with its other datasets to indirectly re-associate records with individuals, even without deliberately trying to identify anyone by name.
Google's response
A Google spokesperson said the data was purchased to improve its products and AI models and that the company won't receive any personal information, since a third party will scrub it before delivery. During the auction, Google beat out its closest rival, Mercor Corporation, which had offered to handle the data scrubbing itself rather than using an independent third party, a term Spirit's creditors preferred from Google.
The AFA has asked the court to withhold approval of the sale unless Google agrees to exclude flight attendant data entirely or notify workers whenever third parties gain access to the data. A hearing where the court may approve the sale is scheduled for September.
