Google has won a $10 million bid to purchase decades of Spirit Airlines data, a sale that would hand the bankrupt carrier’s operational and employee records to the tech giant for use in improving its products and AI models. The proposed transaction, which a bankruptcy court must still approve, beat out a competing $7.5 million offer from the AI training company Mercor. Google has said the dataset will not include customer information or personal data, but the labor union representing 5,500 former Spirit flight attendants has filed a legal objection, arguing that the sale would expose sensitive employee records accumulated over 34 years.
The Association of Flight Attendants, which counts 55,000 members, contends that the data includes everything from time-card records and tax forms to email accounts and Microsoft Teams messages, much of it containing deeply personal medical and family details shared with the airline during employment. The union’s president, Sara Nelson, called the sale outrageous, and one former attendant who spoke anonymously said employees feel extremely violated, noting that their email and files contained information on miscarriages, domestic violence incidents, and union negotiations. The workers argue that even if Google strips identifying details, AI tools make it easier to re-link anonymized data across datasets, so the promised safeguards are insufficient.
Legal experts say this marks the first major public conflict between a labor union and a corporation over the sale of employee data for AI training, highlighting a gap in U.S. law that protects consumers but not workers in bankruptcy proceedings. Seema Patel, a law professor at the University of California, College of the Law, San Francisco, noted that the law has not caught up with the reality that employee-produced information is inseparable from personal data, leaving companies free to exploit it. Ari Ezra Waldman, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, said that if the sale proceeds without limits, no employee would be protected from having their work product repurposed for profit.
The court filing describes a process where Google would select a third party to strip the data of elements linking it to individuals, but the union says that privacy architecture is consumer-facing while the payload is employee-facing. The flight attendants are asking the bankruptcy court to exclude their data from the sale entirely or grant it the same protections as consumer information. A hearing on the sale has been delayed to September 9, and the union has separately intervened to demand roughly $68 million in unpaid vacation, health care, and back pay owed to the workers.
The case comes as startups have made millions selling defunct companies’ old Slack messages, GitHub content, and Google Drives to AI trainers, and as companies race to record human workers for egocentric data collection efforts aimed at automating jobs. The former flight attendant said it is another slap in the face that workers are waiting for missing wages while Spirit profits from their private information. Patel noted that all workers bring immense knowledge, and AI has now made it possible to process all different kinds of that data, a dynamic that the Spirit sale puts into sharp focus for the American workforce.
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