Massive cache of data will be sanitised of personally identifiable information by a third party before transfer to the search giant, says Google.
Third-party scrubbing will be insufficient to protect employees’ identities and other private information if bankrupt Spirit Airlines’ corporate records are sold to Google to train AI models, workers say.
Through their unions, flight attendants and ground crew oppose the $10 million planned data sale, arguing that planned de-identification of personal data is designed to protect former Spirit customers and could still make confidential information about workers public.
“A pseudonymised dataset can still disclose which crew bases generated grievances, how a small subset of flight attendants performed on recurrent training, which employees were subject to investigation, what compensation adjustments followed which events, and what employees said to one another about management, staffing or their union,” the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA said in federal court filings in New York on 18 August.
Spirit stopped flying on 2 May after a lengthy financial struggle, leaving 17,000 employees, nearly 100 planes and thousands of customers in the lurch. In the months since, lawyers have been parting-out the company in the US Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, selling off everything from office space and hangars to landing slots.
The former airline’s estate said in a 14 August court filing that they had accepted a bid from Google to acquire data that includes a massive tranche of employee information: time-card records, employee business-travel histories, training records, crew assignments, tax forms and 100 million emails from 80,000 Microsoft accounts, court documents show.
Google, which outbid AI-training platform Mercor for the massive data set, tells FlightGlobal a third-party ombudsman appointed by the court will oversee the data’s transformation, ensuring all personally identifiable information is sanitised.
The court has not yet approved the sale, delaying a hearing on the purchase to hear objections.
AFA points to a clause in the deal that says the de-identified data must preserve “referential integrity across the data set” and has asked the court to exclude flight attendants’ information from the data.
Three other unions – representing flight dispatchers, ground workers and customer service staff at Fort Lauderdale airport – also filed documents with the court supporting AFA’s objection to the deal. They say AI could now piece together bits from the data that “a human reader would have to expend enormous amounts of time and energy” to do.
“That traditional logic no longer applies in an age where artificial intelligence can reassemble the connections de-identification is meant to obscure in an infinitesimally small fraction of the time, and at an infinitesimally small fraction of the cost,” say the unions.
“The privacy architecture of this transaction is consumer-facing; its payload is disproportionately employee-facing,” they continue. “Hence, the employee data is far more confidential than the customer data, yet receives far less protection than the customer data.”
Assets sold piece-by-piece
Other sales of Spirit’s assets – its former Florida headquarters, flight-training equipment, baggage systems, hangar and take-off and landing slots at New York’s LaGuardia airport – have been sold at auction as well, but not without objection.
The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey opposed JetBlue Airways’ purchase of the bankrupt carrier’s 22 slots, arguing they “do not have intrinsic value without corresponding permission from the airport sponsor to utilise particular facilities at the airport, which is not and could not be auctioned alongside the slots themselves”.
The airport operator told FlightGlobal after the slot transfer was approved by the judge that it looks forward to working with JetBlue.
JetBlue says the additional Laguardia slots will let it funnel more passengers from New England through LaGuardia to Florida and the Caribbean.
“Spirit’s exit represented one of the most-significant strategic opportunities JetBlue has seen in many years,” president Marty St George said on the carrier’s second-quarter earnings call in July.
Meanwhile, 27 Spirit-owned aircraft will head to the auction block in September in potentially the break-up’s largest single-asset sale yet, with a minimum price floor of $668 million.
The post Why former Spirit Airlines flight attendants oppose Google buying defunct carrier’s data first appeared on FlightGlobal.