Google parent company Alphabet has agreed to enhanced privacy protections as part of its $10 million bid for data from defunct Spirit Airlines.
The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the proposed sale will exclude personnel records, including medical files, results of drug and alcohol tests, performance reviews, payroll information, and grievance and arbitration filings.
Unions representing former Spirit pilots and flight attendants had objected to the inclusion of that data, noting Google’s plans to use the information to train its artificial intelligence models. The agreement reached this week resolves the unions’ concerns, the Journal said.
Google will still get most of the corporate information it originally sought, including millions of emails and Microsoft Teams chats, software code, and data related to revenue, operations, productivity, and other areas. An independent monitor will oversee the tech giant’s handling of the data and ensure privacy and security conditions are being met.
Google and Spirit initially planned to have an outside company “deidentify” the airline’s records. That process will still take place, though at a higher standard than Spirit intended to use, and Google will be prohibited from attempting to “reidentify” the data.
Spirit went out of business in May following a dramatic rise in jet fuel prices. The decision to auction off its internal records for use by AI was a first for the airline industry and opened up a new realm of contestation for workers and employers.
“Worker data privacy in the age of AI has become a whole new workers’ rights issue,” Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, said in a statement. “Without our union, there would have been no one to speak for workers in this fire sale of their private information. We fought and we won brand new protections. Now we will take this issue to all of our employers to secure contractual protections and demand lawmakers protect workers everywhere through federal and state law.”
