‘Adding insult to injury’: Flight attendants accuse Google of creepy deal to access ‘confidential’ data for AI in Spirit Airlines transaction

Google’s $10 million purchase of a vast archive of Spirit Airlines’ internal data—which includes employee emails—has run into opposition from flight attendants, who argue that the privacy protections attached to the deal do not adequately cover sensitive information.

The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, which represents flight attendants nationwide, filed an objection in US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York challenging the proposed sale of the airline’s digital records to Google.

“The privacy architecture of this transaction is consumer-facing; its payload is disproportionately employee-facing,” the filing states.

“Hence, the employee data is far more confidential than the customer data, yet receives far less protection than the customer data.” Spirit Airlines has been one of America’s best -known low-cost airlines, building business off of affordable flights and charging separately for services.

But its collapse has led investors and stakeholders to sell off the company’s remaining assets, which include physical and digital property.

The dispute creates a wrinkle in Google’s effort to turn the remains of the bankrupt airline into fuel for its AI ambitions.

The tech giant won a bankruptcy auction for $10 million, beating AI recruiting company Mercor who offered $7.5 million.

The transaction includes roughly 100 million emails and 500 million Microsoft Teams messages—along with spreadsheets, calendars, software code and other internal business records.

Google has disputed the data risk and told Fortune it is currently reviewing the objection filed by the union.

The company posits there will be no personal identifying information that is of concern by the AFA-CWA included in the data obtained by Google.

“We acquired part of an enterprise dataset from Spirit Airlines, which can be helpful in improving our products and AI models,” A Google spokesperson told Fortune .

“We will not receive any personal information from this dataset.” The company also said any data that is received through the sale will be de-identified by an unnamed third party before being obtained by the tech corporation.

According to Google’s sale filing, the data protections applied to the auction include consumer data—but doesn’t specifically state employee confidentiality.

“Assets shall not include information that relates to, describes, or is reasonably capable of being associated with a consumer or is otherwise considered ‘personal data’, ‘personal information’, ‘nonpublic personal information’ or other similar term under applicable data protection laws,” the filing read.