Google’s $10 million purchase of Spirit Airlines’ digital remains has opened a sharp new front in the battle over AI training data. The dispute is not over whether names are removed, but whether a worker’s private history can ever be made truly anonymous.

After Spirit shut down on May 2 and entered bankruptcy, its estate put a vast trove of business records on the block: software, calendars and spreadsheets, as well as roughly 100 million emails and 500 million Microsoft Teams messages. At an August 14 auction, Google outbid AI recruiting firm Mercor, offering $10 million and agreeing to pay for third-party data scrubbing.¹

Google’s position is straightforward: the material is useful for improving products and AI models, but it will arrive only after an outside party removes personally identifiable information. “We will not receive any personal information from this dataset,” a company spokesperson said.² The company has also agreed not to deliberately re-identify people in the data.¹

For the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, that promise addresses the wrong danger. The union’s objection in New York bankruptcy court argues that consumer-focused privacy rules leave employment records exposed. “The privacy architecture of this transaction is consumer-facing; its payload is disproportionately employee-facing,” the filing says.³

The union is not seeking to derail the auction or stop Spirit’s estate from selling assets. It wants stronger safeguards: removal of identifiable employee material, restrictions on use of sensitive workplace records and notice when outsiders gain access. Its concern is that disciplinary files, training deficiencies, accommodation requests and payroll histories remain intimate even after names vanish.¹

Privacy advocates see the fight as larger than one collapsed airline. EFF’s Adam Schwartz said companies should not repurpose workers’ emails for AI training without consent.¹ Flight attendants, still seeking unpaid vacation, sick leave and other compensation, call the proposed data sale “adding insult to injury.”³ A September hearing could determine whether Google’s anonymisation pledge is enough—or whether worker confidentiality gets the same protection promised to consumers.