Spirit Airlines shut down for good earlier this year after filing for bankruptcy a second time, but its records haven’t disappeared. The airline agreed on Friday to hand over a large trove of company data to Google for use in training new AI models. Now, former flight attendants are organizing to stop the deal from moving forward.
Union Files a Formal Objection
The union representing Spirit’s former staff argues that while the deal requires Google to scrub all customer data before it arrives, no similar safeguards protect the thousands of flight attendants who once worked for the airline.
What the Deal Actually Covers
Google won the bidding process with a $10 million offer, beating a $7.5 million bid from AI training startup Mercor. Under the terms, Google must work with a third-party “deidentification agent” to remove sensitive customer information before the data enters its training pipeline, following standards set by the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). AFA attorney Charles Rubio says that approach overlooks employees entirely. The CCPA, he wrote in the objection, “was built for customers, and no comparable screen has been applied to the employment record that this transaction actually conveys.”
According to the court filing, that record includes employee business travel records, crew training records, employee tax forms, and roughly 100 million emails.
Why Removing Names Isn’t Enough
Rubio argues that stripping employee names from the dataset doesn’t solve the problem. A pseudonymized dataset, he wrote, can still reveal “which crew bases generated grievances, how a small subset of flight attendants performed on recurrent training, which employees were subject to investigation, what compensation adjustments followed which events, and what employees said to one another about management, staffing, or their union.”
He’s asking the court to reject the deal unless it explicitly excludes all flight attendant information from the data transfer. The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that the bankruptcy court has postponed approving the $10 million sale following the AFA’s objection.
Google Responds
A Google spokesperson defended the deal in a statement to Gizmodo: “We’re acquiring part of an enterprise dataset from Spirit Airlines, which can be helpful in improving our products and AI models. We will not receive any personal information from this dataset. Any data we receive will be rigorously scrubbed of any personally identifiable information by a third party before receipt.”
A Bigger Push for Enterprise Data
AI companies have already pulled most of the internet’s content into their training pipelines, pushing them to look elsewhere for fresh material. Some researchers have floated synthetic data as one solution, though experts warn that AI systems trained too heavily on their own output can degrade over time.
Spirit’s records offer Google something different: a detailed, real-world picture of daily operations inside a modern company. That kind of data could help Google build AI tools better suited to enterprise customers, a market it’s eager to grow. The timing also matters. Google has been losing a steady stream of AI talent to rival companies, and data like this could help offset that loss by strengthening its product lineup.
