Google has bid $10MN to purchase data from bankrupt U.S. carrier Spirit Airlines, raising a broader question for enterprises. Should AI developers be able to buy the data businesses generate, particularly when that data contains years of operational information, employee activity and customer interactions?
Court filings show that Google was selected as the successful bidder for Spirit’s “deidentified data” at an August 14 bankruptcy auction, beating AI training company Mercor with a $10MN offer. Mercor was named the alternate bidder at $7.5MN.
The transaction still requires approval from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. A hearing originally scheduled for August 19 has been postponed until September 9 following an objection from the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA), which represents Spirit’s former flight attendants.
The dataset contains extensive records generated through the airline’s day-to-day operations, including communications, employee records, workflow data and operational information, which makes it valuable to AI developers.
Spirit is looking to sell off its customer data separately, according to a court filing by Dylan Friesner, Vice President in the Restructuring and Special Situations Group of Spirit’s investment banker PJT Partners:
“The Debtors are separately conducting a marketing process for their customer list and anticipate seeking approval for a sale of their customer list at a future hearing.”
Can Scrubbed Data Still Reveal Information?
Under the current proposed sale agreement, a third-party agent will process the dataset before it is transferred to Google.
The agent must take measures to remove or transform data so that it cannot be associated with, used to infer information about, or linked to a particular consumer and excludes categories of personal data covered by data protection laws. But the agreement also requires the process to preserve “referential integrity across the data.”
The AFA noted that this presents a risk that Google can infer information even though it has nominally been removed. Google can also transfer the “deidentified data” to third parties, provided that it contractually obligates those parties to comply with the terms it has agreed to.
The data contains a substantial amount of employee-generated information. According to the AFA's objection, Spirit’s dataset includes productivity and collaboration data, workflow and process information, HR and legacy operations data and other corporate records. The asset schedule includes 1.09 million time-card records, 175,658 employee records, 3.4 million payroll records and 148,018 employee tax forms. It also includes 100 million emails, 17 million OneDrive items, 20.5 million SharePoint items and 500 million Microsoft Teams items.
The union argues that employees need stronger protections around how this information can subsequently be used. The union has asked the bankruptcy court to exclude flight attendant information from the transaction and prevent it from being transferred, licensed, accessed or used by the buyers or third parties.
The AFA said the transaction's safeguards are designed around identifying consumers, while much of the material being transferred concerns employees.
“The privacy architecture of this transaction is consumer-facing; its payload is disproportionately employee-facing,” the AFA argued. “Hence, the employee data is far more confidential than the customer data, yet receives far less protection than the customer data.”
The case illustrates why data governance needs to account for context as well as identity. The AFA argues that removing a person's name from a customer interaction, employee record or internal conversation does not necessarily remove the sensitivity of the information contained within it.
Should Enterprises Be Able To Sell Data for AI Training?
Friesner’s filing indicates how the value of enterprise data is changing. The AI developers were particularly interested in customer data:
