More than 100 members of Congress sent a letter on Thursday to the CEOs of Google and Spirit Airlines asking them to halt a deal that would give Google internal Spirit data in exchange for $10 million paid to the failed carrier. Google wants the data to train AI models and has said it will be deidentified. According to Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV), the sale would include about 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, employment contracts, employee and timecard records, and payroll and tax information.
The letter, signed by 114 federal lawmakers and led by Horsford and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), accepts that Google says it will not receive personally identifiable information and that the data will be scrubbed by a third party before transfer. It argues those safeguards may not be enough, because “removing names, email addresses, or other direct identifiers does not necessarily make a dataset anonymous” in the context of modern AI. Almost 1,000 people in Las Vegas lost their jobs when Spirit announced in May that it would shut down.
If the companies go ahead, the lawmakers want a deidentification process that takes former employees’ feedback into account, as much employee information as possible excluded from the transfer, limits on how the data can be used, and an independent employee confidentiality review. A Google spokesperson said the company is “not looking to buy any personal information from Spirit” and that the data will either be excluded or deidentified by an independent third party before Google receives it. The Record reports that Spirit is defunct and it could not locate a press contact.
Sources
- Spirit Airlines to sell employee data to train Google AI: Horsford and Warren lead call for worker privacy protections — Rep. Steven Horsford
- Letter to Google and Spirit Airlines (PDF) — Rep. Steven Horsford
- Lawmakers warn Google could expose Spirit Airlines data in $10 million AI training deal — The Record