Spirit Airlines Wants to Sell Its Data to Google. Former Flight Attendants Are Freaked Out | WIRED

Overview

Spirit Airlines Wants to Sell Its Data to Google. Former Flight Attendants Are Freaked Out

Spirit Airlines may have declared bankruptcy this spring, but the budget airline is still worth something—to AI giants, at least. In mid-August, Google won a $10 million bid to purchase some 34 years of the airline’s data, from invoices and flight operations information to Wi-Fi sales, employee records, and crew pairings.

Details

In a statement, a Google spokesperson said the data “can be helpful in improving our products and AI models.” The sale would not include customer data, and Google “will not receive any personal information from this dataset,” the spokesperson said. The winning offer, chosen over a competing $7.5 million proposal from AI data and training company Mercor, has to be approved by a judge.

If former Spirit Airlines attendants have their way, that won’t happen easily. Just days after the court announced Google’s winning bid, the labor union representing 5,500 former Spirit Airlines flight attendants filed an objection to the sale. Lawyers for the 55,000-member Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) argue the sale would include an enormous amount of sensitive employee information, and that even Google’s promised safeguards wouldn’t prevent privacy violations of decades of flight attendants who never could have guessed that their data would be sold to train AI systems.

The employee data “has no business being sold,” Sara Nelson, the president of the AFA, said in a written statement to WIRED. “This is outrageous!”

The legal objection opens a potential new front in the AI data wars, as major frontier labs including Google, Open AI, Anthropic, and Mercor scramble to find new sources of data to help train their products. US laws have contemplated how best to protect consumer data, even after companies go bankrupt and are sold off for parts—laws that have taken on new salience and value in the age of AI.

But the Spirit Airlines’ flight attendants’ legal objection highlights the gap between data protections for consumers and for workers. It also marks the first public tangle between labor unions and corporations over the sale and use of employee data for AI training purposes, legal experts say.

“There is no boundary between the information and data that the employee is producing and their own personal information. The law has not caught up,” says Seema Patel, a law professor at the University of California, College of the Law, San Francisco, who studies labor issues and technology. (California is one of the few states to have explicit worker data protection laws.) "Companies are having a field day with this.”

In the past few months, startups specializing in selling defunct companies’ data—including old Slack messages, Git Hub content, and Google Drives—to those training AI have reportedly made millions. Meanwhile, so-called egocentric data collection efforts are on the rise, as companies race to record humans performing work like cooking meals, cleaning kitchens, and operating factory lines, and use that data to train machines to aid and eventually replace them.

The Spirit data sale would, according to a court filing, include more than 1 million time-card records, over 175,000 employee records, nearly 150,000 employee tax forms, employment contracts and litigation files, 80,000 email accounts, 17 million individually owned Microsoft One Drive items, 20.6 million shared Microsoft Share Point files, and 500 million Microsoft Teams records.

The court filing describes a process through which the data buyer—Google—would select or OK a third party to strip the data of elements that could be used to link the information with a particular consumer. A hearing related to the data sale has been delayed to September 9.

One former Spirit Airlines flight attendant called the potential data sale “troubling.” “I knew they were going to sell every single part of consumer data. It never crossed my mind that they would be so bold as to sell our private data for AI,” says the flight attendant, who spoke to WIRED under condition of anonymity because they’re still looking for new employment.

The flight attendant says his and other employees’ email accounts and Microsoft files included deeply sensitive personal and medical information shared with the airline as part of their employment and insurance agreements, detailing everything from miscarriages to incidents of domestic violence to union contract negotiations. “There’s this huge consensus of feeling extremely violated by this,” he says.

In its legal objection, AFA argues that “deidentifying” employee data isn’t the same as providing confidentiality, because AI itself makes it much easier to relink private information across datasets, even without specific names. “The privacy architecture of this transaction is consumer-facing; its payload is disproportionately employee-facing,” the union's lawyers wrote. The union argues the bankruptcy court should either exclude all flight-attendant-related data from the sale or guarantee that employee data receives the same protections as consumer information.

Though the flight attendants’ objections are just a small part of the larger Spirit Airlines bankruptcy proceeding, the outcome could have a major effect on how labor unions and companies think about employee data going forward, says Ari Ezra Waldman, a professor of law at the University of California, Irvine, who studies privacy and technology.

“In a world where billions and trillions are being spent on [large language models], anything where words are used is subject to its own profit-making purpose,” he says. “If this goes forward with no limitation, there is no protection for any employee.”

The fact that flight attendants are at the forefront of this labor question, rather than workers who sit at desks and type all day, is a reminder that all employees can create data with market value. “All workers bring an immense amount of knowledge,” Patel says. “Now artificial intelligence has given us the ability to process all different kinds of data.”

More value, meanwhile, is one of the former Spirit Airlines’ flight attendants’ goals. Separately, the union has also intervened in the bankruptcy to demand roughly $68 million in unpaid vacation, health care, and back pay.

“We feel it's another slap in the face that we're waiting for our missing wages while Spirit is going to profit $10 million off our private information,” says the former flight attendant.

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Key Takeaways

Spirit Airlines Wants to Sell Its Data to Google
Spirit Airlines may have declared bankruptcy this spring, but the budget airline is still worth something—to AI giants, at least
In a statement, a Google spokesperson said the data “can be helpful in improving our products and AI models
If former Spirit Airlines attendants have their way, that won’t happen easily
The employee data “has no business being sold,” Sara Nelson, the president of the AFA, said in a written statement to WIRED