Google won a $10 million bid in mid-August 2026 to purchase approximately 34 years of Spirit Airlines’ data, following the budget carrier’s bankruptcy earlier this year. The dataset spans invoices, flight operations records, Wi-Fi sales data, employee records, crew pairings, and vast stores of digital communications. A competing $7.5 million bid from AI data and training company Mercor was passed over. The sale still requires court approval.
The union representing 5,500 former Spirit Airlines flight attendants filed a formal legal objection to the sale days after the winning bid was announced. The 55,000-member Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) argues the transaction would expose decades of sensitive employee information to a buyer those workers never anticipated. “The employee data has no business being sold,” AFA president Sara Nelson said in a statement. “This is outrageous!”
According to court filings, the dataset includes more than 1 million time-card records, over 175,000 employee records, nearly 150,000 employee tax forms, employment contracts, litigation files, 80,000 email accounts, 17 million individually owned Microsoft OneDrive items, 20.6 million shared Microsoft SharePoint files, and 500 million Microsoft Teams records.
Google has said the data “can be helpful in improving our products and AI models” and stated that no customer personal information would be included in the transfer. The company described a process in which a third party would strip data of elements that could identify individual consumers. A court hearing on the sale has been delayed to September 9, 2026.
Legal experts say the case may be the first public dispute between a labor union and a corporation over the sale of employee data for AI training. The objection highlights a gap in US law between consumer data protections and worker data protections. “The law has not caught up,” said Seema Patel, a law professor at the University of California, College of the Law, San Francisco. “Companies are having a field day with this.”
Source: WIRED