Spirit Airlines Aims to Market Its Data to Google, Sparking Concerns Among Ex-Flight Attendants.

Spirit Airlines may have filed for bankruptcy this spring, but it still holds value—especially for AI companies. In mid-August, Google secured a $10 million deal to acquire roughly 34 years’ worth of the airline’s data, encompassing invoices, flight operations, Wi-Fi sales, employee records, and crew pairings.

A Google representative stated that the data “can enhance our products and AI models.” It’s important to note that customer data will not be included, and Google “will not receive any personal information from this dataset,” the representative clarified. The winning bid, which outpaced a competing offer of $7.5 million from AI company Mercor, requires judicial approval.

However, if former Spirit Airlines attendants have their say, this approval may not come easily. Shortly after the announcement of Google’s winning bid, the union representing 5,500 former flight attendants lodged an objection to the sale. Attorneys for the 55,000-member Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) argue that the proposed transaction involves extensive sensitive employee information, and that even with Google’s promised protections, privacy violations of flight attendants who never expected their data would be used to train AI systems could occur.

Sara Nelson, AFA president, emphasized in a statement to WIRED that the employee data “should not be sold.” She called the situation “outrageous!”

This legal challenge signifies a new battleground in the AI data landscape, as leading labs like Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mercor vie for fresh data to advance their AI training efforts. Existing U.S. laws have addressed consumer data protection, even amidst bankruptcy proceedings—regulations that have gained renewed significance in the AI era.

The objection from Spirit Airlines flight attendants highlights the disparity in data protection for consumers versus workers. It also represents the first notable confrontation between labor unions and corporations regarding the sale and utilization of employee data for AI training, according to legal experts.

“There’s no separation between the information produced by employees and their personal information. The law hasn’t caught up yet,” asserts Seema Patel, a law professor at the University of California, College of the Law, San Francisco, who specializes in labor issues and technology. (California is among the few states with explicit worker data protection laws.) “Companies are taking full advantage of this.”

Recently, startups focusing on selling data from defunct companies—such as archived Slack messages, GitHub content, and Google Drives—to those developing AI reportedly generated millions of dollars. Concurrently, there’s an uptick in egocentric data collection initiatives, as companies rush to capture humans engaged in tasks like cooking meals, cleaning kitchens, and managing factory lines, with the goal of training machines to assist and potentially replace them.

According to court documents, the Spirit data deal would encompass 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 Microsoft OneDrive items owned by individuals, 20.6 million shared Microsoft SharePoint files, and 500 million records from Microsoft Teams.

The court filing outlines a procedure whereby the buyer—Google—could select or approve a third party to remove details that could connect the data to a specific consumer. A hearing concerning the data sale has been postponed to September 9.