The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA is challenging the proposed sale of Spirit Airlines’ data to tech giant Google.
In a recent filing with the U.S. bankruptcy court overseeing Spirit’s liquidation, AFA argued that a proposed “deidentification” process for the data would not necessarily redact confidential worker information.
“A flight attendant’s disciplinary correspondence, a crew training deficiency, a leave or accommodation request, an internal Teams exchange about staffing or scheduling grievances, and a payroll adjustment history each remain sensitive employment information whether or not the employee’s name has been stripped from it,” the union wrote. “The sale agreement nowhere requires that anyone screen for, segregate, or restrict the use of confidential employee information as such.”
The filing goes on to note that while almost all consumer-facing data categories are shielded under the agreement’s current language, most “team member” information, such as time cards, travel records, and tax forms, are not.
“The privacy architecture of this transaction is consumer-facing; its payload is disproportionately employee-facing,” the union said. “Hence, the employee data is far more confidential than the customer data, yet receives far less protection than the customer data.”
AFA is asking the court to exclude all flight attendant data as a condition of the deal. It said it will continue to oppose the sale unless that condition is met.
Google last week won a court-supervised auction for nearly all of Spirit’s remaining internal records, including millions of emails and Microsoft Teams chats, software code, and data related to revenue, operations, productivity, and other areas. According to Bloomberg, employment records going back decades are part of the dataset.
Google agreed to pay $10 million for the information, besting tech startup Mercor. It said it will use the data to train its AI systems.
The bankruptcy court must sign off on the deal before any data can be transferred to Google.
