Google Paying $10 Million For Spirit Airlines' Data To Train AI - Forbes

Topline Google agreed to pay $10 million for an enormous trove of business data from bankrupt Spirit Airlines—but the carrier’s flight attendant union is raising questions about what happens to privacy after a company goes belly up and AI swoops in. In early May, check-in counters for Spirit Airlines at the George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston were permanently closed. getty Key Facts A U.S. bankruptcy judge has postponed a court hearing until Sept. 9 after the union representing 5,500 Spirit Airlines flight attendants filed an objection to the sale on Tuesday. Google beat out other AI firms to acquire Spirit Airlines' internal business data after the airline went bankrupt, according to a court filing last Friday. Google hopes the “enterprise dataset” from Spirit Airlines will “be helpful in improving our products and AI models,” a Google spokesperson told Forbes in an email. The raw data includes nearly 100 million passenger names and nearly 13 million active email addresses as well as nearly 176,000 employee records and 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, according to court documents. A court-appointed third-party ombudsman will oversee a process known as “deidentification,” which requires “reasonable measures” to anonymize data so it cannot be linked to individuals. “We will not receive any personal information from this dataset,” the Google spokesperson told Forbes. Crucial Quote “This is outrageous! We are filing a court objection to Google’s attempt to buy data that has no business being sold,” Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, which continues to represent more than 5,500 of Spirit’s flight attendants, told Forbes on Tuesday. Big Number $7.5 million. That was the losing bid from Mercor, a firm that connects professionals to AI training projects. Mercor was founded by the world’s youngest self-made billionaires . Why Google’s Acquisition Of Spirit Airlines’ Data Matters AI firms are increasingly gobbling up defunct businesses’ internal communications— Slack archives, Jira tickets, email threads, Google Drive files and more—to improve their models’ skillsets in areas like customer service, financial services and calendar management, as Forbes reported . Google is acquiring Spirit’s enormous digital footprint of how a major airline operated, including extensive internal and external communications records. The competing bid from Mercor shows how AI companies are competing for this valuable new source of training material. Why Do Spirit Airlines Flight Attendants Object To The Sale? They have privacy concerns. According to the sale agreement, Spirit’s data records must be “deidentified,” which means they cannot be traced to a named individual. But the flight attendant union says the agreement’s language does not address confidential records. In addition, the deidentification process must preserve “referential integrity across the data set,” meaning linkages between records must be maintained so the AI model can view the entire lifecycle of how a specific issue was handled throughout Spirit’s various systems. “With a group the size of the Spirit flight attendant population, our union has significant concerns that it may be possible that information about identifiable individuals or small identifiable groups can still be reconstructed and determined,” the union said in a statement. CONTRA Google is not interested in acquiring customers’ personal information, including loyalty memberships or credit card details, a person familiar with the acquisition told Forbes on the condition of anonymity. Google says it intends to use real-world data scrubbed of identifying markers to help its AI agents perform better. Last month, the U.S. Trustee , a Justice Department bankruptcy system watchdog, appointed an independent consumer privacy ombudsman in connection with Spirit’s sale of assets. Further Reading AI’s New Training Data: Your Old Work Slacks And Emails (Forbes) Trump Wants To Give Spirit Airlines An 'America First' Rescue (Forbes)