Google would pay $10 million for decades of Spirit Airlines data under a liquidation sale, but a deal reached this week with the union representing the airline's flight attendants adds new privacy safeguards for workers whose records are included. A judge must still approve the agreement next week. The Association for Flight Attendants, which represents 55,000 members, had argued that Google's original proposed protections would not prevent serious privacy violations.
The sale covers records dating back to 1986, including 1.99 billion emails, 664 million Microsoft Teams messages, and employee travel and training information. Under the revised deal, Spirit must hire a third-party data de-identification company, Tonic AI, to strip out information that could be tied to individual consumers or employees. Tonic must also ensure the de-identified data cannot be relinked to specific people, and Google has promised to keep the data in that form.
Several categories of sensitive records are excluded from the sale, including employee medical records, documents about employee investigations and labor relations, and information on industry-wide safety management systems. In early November, an airline trade organization argued that including that material could discourage employees from reporting safety issues through voluntary programs, which it said are widely regarded as critical to the strong safety record of the US aviation industry. The agreement also gives Google an opt-out: it can abandon the sale if the data-cleaning process cuts the assets by more than 8 percent. Google did not respond to a request for comment.
Sara Nelson, president of the Association for Flight Attendants, said she was as surprised as anyone that flight attendants are at the center of AI-related workers' rights issues, which often focus on employees who train their machine replacements. She said replacing a flight attendant would require a high-functioning robot that appears to be far off, and that the case shows the issue affects even jobs seen as most protected from AI. Nelson said the union will immediately begin demanding that other airlines include worker-data-protection clauses in labor agreements, and that it has begun meeting with state-level politicians to craft legislation writing such protections into law.
Ari Ezra Waldman, a professor at the UC Irvine School of Law who studies law and technology, called the proposed settlement a pretty good outcome for Spirit employees. He wrote in an email that unions will now know to negotiate protections for privacy rights in the event of future data asset sales, and he raised banning such sales altogether as another, possibly easier, alternative. Tech leaders have argued that workers understand their information will train AI models that will ultimately improve their lives, with one executive telling WIRED that the upside and abundance AI can produce must be considered. Nelson said US workers are not buying that upside and are part of an electorate growing warier of the technology by the day, describing the vision of AI abundance as a fantasyland of people in boardrooms with beanbags who wear hoodies.
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