‘Adding insult to injury’: Flight attendants accuse Google of creepy deal to access ‘confidential’ data for AI in Spirit Airlines transaction

Google’s $10 million bid for Spirit Airlines’ leftover digital archive has hit a new snag: the flight attendants’ union says the deal doesn’t do enough to protect employee privacy. The sale covers a huge pile of internal records, including about 100 million emails and 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, plus spreadsheets, calendars, software code and more.

The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA filed its objection in US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. Its core complaint is simple: the sale paperwork talks a lot about consumer data, but not enough about employee data, even though the union says those records are more confidential. In its filing, the group argued that the protections are aimed at customers while the “payload” is mostly employee-facing.

Google won the bankruptcy auction over AI recruiting company Mercor, which had offered $7.5 million. The company says it is reviewing the objection and insists it will not receive personal identifying information it cares about. A spokesperson told Fortune the dataset is meant to help improve Google’s products and AI models, and said any data passed along will be de-identified by a third party first.

That promise is exactly what the union is pushing back on. AFA-CWA says the sale filing does not clearly address whether the records themselves are confidential, and worries deidentification could still leave “referential integrity” intact across the dataset. The union is not trying to blow up the whole auction; it says it wants identifying details stripped out so the airline’s records can be sold without exposing people attached to them.