A US bankruptcy court has delayed approval of Google’s planned $10 million purchase of Spirit Airlines’ digital archives after the former flight attendants raise privacy concerns. According to a report by the Wall Street Journal, the objection filed with the US Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan, warned that the deal could violate worker privacy by allowing employee data to be used to train artificial intelligence models.
Google’s plan to buy Spirit Airlines’ 100 million emails: Union’s privacy concerns
The labor union representing thousands of former Spirit flight attendants urged the court to block the sale unless the agreement explicitly excludes confidential employee information or guarantees equal protection for it as consumer data. The union said the transaction’s privacy safeguards focus on customer data, leaving employee records — including payroll, tax forms, and travel logs — exposed. “The privacy architecture of this transaction is consumer‑facing; its payload is disproportionately employee‑facing,” the filing stated.
What Google is buying
Google won the auction for Spirit’s digital archives last week, acquiring decades of payroll, travel and recruiting files alongside roughly 100 million emails, 80,000 email accounts, and millions of additional digital items. The company has said it intends to use the data to improve its products and AI models, and that personal customer information would not be part of the purchase.
Where the union sees a gap
The flight attendants’ association argued in its filing that while customer data may be shielded under the current agreement, the deal lacks adequate safeguards for information tied to the people who actually worked for the now-defunct airline.According to the union, there’s a clear asymmetry in how the transaction handles customer versus employee data: customer profiles, email addresses, loyalty program data and chat sessions were largely excluded from the sale, while nearly every category of data tied to former employees, including time card records, payroll information, tax forms and business travel records, remains included. The union summarized the imbalance by stating that the transaction’s privacy protections are built around consumers, even though its actual data payload is weighted disproportionately toward employees.The union also pushed back on the adequacy of “deidentification” as a safeguard, arguing that removing information linking a record to a named individual does not address whether the underlying contents of that record remain confidential.
Google’s response
Google, which won the auction last week, said it plans to use the data to improve its products and AI models but will not receive any personal information. “Any data we receive will be rigorously scrubbed of any personally identifiable information by a third party before receipt,” a spokesperson said. Spirit confirmed it is engaging a third party to deidentify the data and certify compliance with privacy laws.
Court’s next steps
Judge Sean Lane postponed the sale hearing to September 9 to review the union’s claims. The sale agreement requires that all data be “deidentified” to remove elements linking it to individuals, but the union argued that deidentification only prevents tracing records to names — not the disclosure of confidential content.
