A bankruptcy court delayed approval of Google’s $10 million purchase of Spirit Airlines’ data after former flight attendants objected, warning that the deal could violate worker privacy to feed artificial intelligence models.
Google last week won the auction of Spirit’s digital archives that include decades of payroll, travel and recruiting files, along with about 100 million emails, 80,000 email accounts and millions of additional digital items.
Google said it plans to use the data to improve its products and AI models, and that personal customer information wouldn’t be included in the purchase. “We will not receive any personal information from this data set,” said a Google spokesperson. “Any data we receive will be rigorously scrubbed of any personally identifiable information by a third party before receipt.”
The sale agreement between Google and Spirit mandates that the data be “deidentified” to remove elements that would link the information to a consumer or otherwise be considered personal data.
