Spirit Airlines workers oppose Google data purchase in bankruptcy

Former Spirit Airlines flight attendants and ground crew are opposing Google's planned $10 million purchase of the bankrupt carrier's corporate data, according to court filings. Through their unions, workers argue that third-party scrubbing of personally identifiable information is not enough to protect their identities and other private information if the data goes to Google for AI training.

The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA said in federal court filings in New York on 18 August that a pseudonymised dataset could still reveal which crew bases generated grievances, how a small subset of flight attendants performed on recurrent training, which employees were subject to investigation, and what compensation adjustments followed which events.

Spirit stopped flying on 2 May after a lengthy financial struggle, leaving 17,000 employees. The airline's estate said in a 14 August court filing that it accepted a bid from Google to acquire data including time-card records, employee business-travel histories, training records, crew assignments, tax forms, and 100 million emails from 80,000 Microsoft accounts.

Google, which outbid AI-training platform Mercor, said a court-appointed third-party ombudsman would oversee the data's transformation, ensuring all personally identifiable information is sanitised before transfer.