Flight attendants freaked out that Google is buying

What happened

Last Friday, Google won an auction to acquire a huge amount of Spirit Airlines data. The data doesn’t include personal information or customer data, but instead nearly covers the airline’s entire employment and workplace record.

Competing bids raised next were rejected after requesting additional consumer data, including a certain customer list that Spirit wouldn’t sell. But any bid seeking to include PII in the sale was cast aside after the first round.

Included in the dataset were Spirit computer programs, applications, and code, as well as worker data spanning decades, including approximately 100 million employee emails, HR information, payroll data, and data measuring employee behaviors, activity, and productivity. A court document showed that Google spent two and a half hours fighting off other bidders.

Mercor Corporation was its fiercest rival for the data, but Mercor tried to avoid terms that would require a third party to scrub the data. Instead, Mercor floated rejected bids repeatedly offering to scrub the data itself.

Ultimately, Google won by offering the highest price, $10 million, as well as by going the extra step of covering the costs of hiring a third-party service to scrub the data to comply with consumer privacy laws. 5 million was accepted from Mercor, should Google fail to follow through on the purchase.

In the flight attendants’ objection—which is “limited” and does not seek to disrupt the sale—the AFA argued that Spirit debtors should have protected workers as strongly as they did consumers. “The Sale Agreement nowhere requires that anyone screen for, segregate, or restrict the use of confidential employee information” that employees deem sensitive.

Specifically, they argued: Further, they’re concerned that despite Google’s agreement to never intentionally re-identify anyone in the data, the company could possibly combine the worker data with other Google datasets to re-associate them with their Spirit data. In a statement to Ars, a Google spokesperson suggested that the company isn’t interested in using the data to identify people connected to Spirit Airlines.

” Although the AFA doesn’t make a “technical claim that any particular record can be re-identified,” they feel that they don’t need to because the risk is not speculative.

Why it matters

To ensure that no individual can be identified in the dataset, Google agreed to use a court-appointed ombudsman to oversee a process to strip any personally identifying information (PII) from the data before it’s transferred to Google. Under the deal, Google agreed to maintain the data in this de-identified form and to never intentionally re-identify the data.

And if Google sells access to the data, third parties would supposedly be bound by the same terms. It may sound like a solid plan if you ever flew on Spirit Airlines and interacted with an employee by email or chat. However, Google’s privacy commitments protecting Spirit customers don’t seem to extend to former Spirit workers.

Panicked by the deal, former flight attendants are now rushing to object, worried that Google has not agreed to strip confidential information that workers fear could possibly be used by Google or a third party to link them to scrubbed data.

In a court filing Tuesday, the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), a collective bargaining unit that represents Spirit workers, argued that Google relied on consumer protection laws to guarantee the data wouldn’t contain personally identifying information (PII).

However, those laws do not cover worker confidentiality, and that allegedly leaves a huge privacy loophole in Google’s deal, especially when you consider that the tech giant is buying worker data, not consumer data. “The privacy architecture of this transaction is consumer-facing; its payload is disproportionately employee-facing,” the AFA argued.

” The sale comes after Spirit Airlines went bankrupt and decided to auction off a massive dataset to the highest bidder. A privacy litigation director for a digital rights nonprofit called the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Adam Schwartz, told Ars that the sale alarmed privacy advocates.

“EFF opposes using a person’s data for a new purpose without first getting their consent, which does not happen when a bankrupt company sells its employees’ emails to become AI training data,” Schwartz said. At the auction, Spirit debtors seemingly prioritized choosing a buyer with a plan that would least frustrate the customers it lost when the airline abruptly shuttered on May 2.

The virtual auction was described beat for beat in a court filing supporting the data sale to Google from Dylan Friesner, the vice president of PJT Partners LP, which is Spirit Airlines’ investment banker. Held on August 14, Google placed the opening bid at $5 million, while promising from the start to cover the cost of a third party scrubbing the data.

What to watch

Google purchased the data to improve its AI and other products. “We acquired part of an enterprise dataset from Spirit Airlines, which can be helpful in improving our products and AI models,” the spokesperson said. “We will not receive any personal information from this dataset.