A hearing is scheduled for 14 October about the sale of Spirit’s data to Google.
More than 100 US lawmakers are pushing for more privacy restrictions on worker data from the former Spirit Airlines if acquired by Google as part of court-overseen asset sales.
The tech giant won rights to the purchase at auction in August, and plans to use the massive cache of data to train artificial intelligence models.
A court-ordered privacy ombudsman has set restrictions on how the data may be used to protect consumer privacy, but flight attendants and pilots, through their unions, have said this oversight is not enough.
Lawmakers led by senator Elizabeth Warren have echoed many of their concerns ahead of a hearing scheduled for 14 October that could determine the transaction’s fate.
“Innovation should not come at the expense of workers’ privacy or the confidentiality of information they were required to provide as a condition of employment,” the 121 elected officials write. “The unprecedented scale and sophistication of modern artificial intelligence make it particularly important that privacy protections keep pace with the technology.”
Included in the dataset are years of corporate emails and Microsoft Teams chat messages, payroll information and employee records including crew scheduling data. The sale is part of a bankruptcy wind down that has also included auctions for aircraft and real-estate.
The lawmakers urged Google to protect sensitive employee information even after de-identification and to establish systems to prohibit re-identification. They have also asked for as much worker data as possible to be removed from the dataset.
“Consumers have more privacy protections than workers, yet Spirit has collected far more private information about its employees than about its customers,” say the lawmakers.
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