- The largest flight attendant union in the US is fighting to stop Google from acquiring a trove of crew member data as part of its $10 million purchase of Spirit Airlines’ business data in bankruptcy.
- What’s actually in the data set, from 100 million emails to 5 million crew pairings and payroll records.
- Why the union says “deidentified” data can still expose individual flight attendants or small groups of them.
- What Google plans to do with the data, and how it’s outbid a rival AI company to get it.
- When a bankruptcy court will decide whether flight attendant data gets stripped from the sale.
The largest flight attendant union in the United States is fighting to stop Google from getting its hands on a treasure trove of data connected to crew members who worked at the defunct low-cost carrier Spirit Airlines.
On Monday, it was revealed that Google had beaten out rival bidder Mercor for a vast haul of Spirit’s enterprise data, including 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams records, 17.1 million OneDrive files, 20.6 million SharePoint files, 667,563 IT tickets, and an entire codebase.
Google has agreed to pay Spirit’s liquidators $10 million for the data, which also includes five million crew pairings, human resources records, payroll, training, and employee workflow records. A New York bankruptcy court will have the final say on whether the sale can proceed next month,
Now, the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA-CWA), which represented Spirit’s crew members, has filed a motion opposing the sale of any information related to flight attendants, even though this data is subject to deidentification.
“Spirit announced in a court filing that it intends to sell a wide range of data to Google as part of its ongoing sales of remaining assets. Outrageously, this information is proposed to include sensitive employee information, such as a wide variety of employment records, payroll records, emails, SharePoint, and Microsoft Teams information, among others,” the union slammed.
AFA is adamantly opposed to the sale of your data… We will fight this every way possible.
Association of Flight Attendants–CWA
“Spirit’s disclosure indicates that these records will be “deidentified,” which addresses whether a record can be traced to a named individual. However, it does not address whether the contents of the record are confidential,” a statement from the union continued.
Even if the data is deidentified, the AFA fears “it may be possible that information about identifiable individuals or small identifiable groups can still be reconstructed and determined.” Google has selected its own third-party deidentification vendor.
In its court filing, the union’s attorneys have demanded that the sale be barred until all flight attendant data is removed from the data set, including flight attendant records, business travel records, flight training records, payroll records, tax forms, flight attendant documents, crew base information, crew pairing information, litigation case files pertaining to flight attendants, and any Microsoft 365 content that contains or reflects flight attendant information.
To be clear, the union says that it isn’t opposing the sale of data to Google, and that it is simply trying to reduce the risk that individual flight attendants or small subgroups of flight attendants can be identified from the data, even once the deidentification process has been completed.
The motion explains: “A pseudonymized dataset can still disclose which crew bases generated grievances, how a small subset of flight attendants performed on recurrent training, which employees were subject to investigation, what compensation adjustments followed which events, and what employees said to one another about management, staffing, or their union.”
Google has moved to reassure privacy rights groups that the data it acquires from Spirit will be “rigorously scrubbed of any personally identifiable information by a third party before receipt.”
The tech giant says it intends to use the data to train its AI models. Google outbid AI talent recruiting company Mercor by $2.5 million for the Spirit Airlines data.
The next court hearing, which could decide whether flight attendant data is scrubbed from the sale list is scheduled for September 9.
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