Spirit Airlines may have declared bankruptcy this spring, but the budget airline is still worth something — to AI giants, at least. In mid-August, Google won a $10 million bid to purchase some 34 years of the airline's data, from invoices and flight operations information to Wi-Fi sales, employee records and crew pairings.

In a statement, a Google spokesperson said the data "can be helpful in improving our products and AI models." The sale would not include customer data, and Google "will not receive any personal information from this dataset," the spokesperson said. The winning offer, chosen over a competing $7.5 million proposal from AI data and training company Mercor, has to be approved by a judge.

The union pushed back

If former Spirit Airlines attendants have their way, that approval will not come easily. Days after the court announced Google's winning bid, the labor union representing 5,500 former flight attendants filed an objection. Lawyers for the 55,000-member Association of Flight Attendants argue the sale would include an enormous amount of sensitive employee information, and that even Google's promised safeguards would not prevent privacy violations of decades of flight attendants who never could have guessed their data would be sold to train AI systems.

The employee data "has no business being sold," Sara Nelson, the union's president, said in a written statement to Wired. "This is outrageous!"

What the sale covers

According to a court filing, the sale includes:

  • More than 1 million time-card records
  • Over 175,000 employee records and nearly 150,000 tax forms
  • 80,000 email accounts
  • 17 million individually owned cloud items and 20.6 million shared corporate files
  • 500 million corporate messaging records

The filing describes a process through which the buyer — Google — would select or approve a third party to strip the data of elements that could link the information to a particular consumer. A hearing related to the sale has been delayed to September 9.

Consumers are protected; workers are not

The legal objection opens a potential new front in the AI data wars, as major labs including Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and Mercor scramble to find new sources of data to train their products. US laws have contemplated how best to protect consumer data even after companies go bankrupt and are sold off for parts — laws that have taken on new salience in the age of AI.

But the flight attendants' objection highlights the gap between data protections for consumers and for workers. Legal experts say it marks the first public tangle between labor unions and corporations over the sale and use of employee data for AI training.

Seema Patel, a law professor at the University of California who studies labor issues and technology, describes the gap: "There is no boundary between the information and data that the employee is producing and their own personal information. The law has not caught up. Companies are having a field day with this."

Why it matters

One former flight attendant, speaking anonymously because they are still looking for work, says employees' email accounts and cloud files contained deeply sensitive personal and medical information shared with the airline as part of employment and insurance agreements — everything from miscarriages to incidents of domestic violence to union contract negotiations. "There's this huge consensus of feeling extremely violated by this," he says.

In its objection, the union argues that "deidentifying" employee data is not the same as providing confidentiality. The reason lies in the technology itself: AI makes it far easier than before to make a person re-identifiable from scattered fragments.

The outcome of this sale will set a precedent at a moment when startups specializing in selling defunct companies' data are multiplying. Old messaging records, code repositories and cloud drives are already changing hands. The question is this: when a company collapses, who owns the data the people who worked there produced over years?