Google has won a court-supervised auction to buy a huge trove of Spirit Airlines' internal data, prompting alarm from former flight attendants who fear their private information could be exposed. The bankrupt airline's dataset excludes customer records but contains nearly its entire employment and workplace archive; Google has committed to having a court-appointed ombudsman strip out personally identifiable information before the transfer and to never intentionally re-identify it. However, the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA) argues in a court filing that the consumer protection laws underpinning these privacy safeguards do not cover worker confidentiality, leaving what it calls a significant loophole given the data is overwhelmingly employee-related rather than customer-related.

The dataset includes decades of worker records, among them roughly 100 million employee emails, HR and payroll information, and data tracking staff behaviour and productivity, alongside Spirit's software and code. At the auction on 14 August, Google opened with a $5 million bid and offered to fund third-party data scrubbing, seeing off rival bidder Mercor Corporation, which had resisted the same scrubbing terms, after a two-and-a-half-hour contest. The sale follows Spirit's bankruptcy and abrupt shutdown on 2 May, with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Adam Schwartz warning that using employees' data for new purposes, such as AI training, without their consent is problematic.