Google and a flight attendant union have reached a deal to prevent personal employee data from being sold to Google during Spirit Airlines’ liquidation. A judge must approve the agreement next week.
Google previously offered to buy decades of Spirit Airlines records for $10 million. The company stated it would not receive personal information. The Association for Flight Attendants argued that proposed safeguards were insufficient. The union noted the sale included 1.99 billion emails, 664 million Microsoft Teams messages, and travel data dating back to 1986.
The revised terms
Spirit Airlines must now hire Tonic AI to strip personal identifiers from the data. Tonic will also ensure the cleaned data cannot be relinked to specific individuals. Google has promised to keep the information in this de-identified form.
Many sensitive files are excluded from the sale. This includes medical records, documents regarding employee investigations, and labor relations data. A trade group representing airlines warned that selling this information could discourage staff from reporting safety issues through voluntary programs.
The agreement includes an opt-out clause. Google can cancel the sale if the data-cleaning process reduces the asset value by more than 8 percent.
What it means
Sara Nelson, president of the Association for Flight Attendants, stated she is surprised flight attendants are at the forefront of AI worker rights issues. She noted that replacing a flight attendant requires a high-functioning robot, a technology that is still far off. She said the dispute shows that data privacy is an issue for everyone, even in jobs thought to be protected from AI.
The union will immediately demand that other airlines include worker data protection clauses in their labor agreements. Nelson said the union would shame airlines that refuse to meet these standards. The association has also begun meeting with state politicians to draft legislation for worker data protections.
Ari Ezra Waldman, a law professor at UC Irvine, called the settlement a good outcome for Spirit Airlines employees. He said unions should negotiate to protect privacy rights in future data asset sales. He also pointed to banning data sales altogether as a simpler alternative.
Tech leaders have argued that workers understand their information trains AI models that will make their lives better. One executive told WIRED this month that they must focus on the upside and abundance AI can result in.
Nelson said US workers do not believe in this upside. She described the vision of AI abundance as a fantasyland of people in boardrooms with beanbags who wear hoodies.
