More than 120 U.S. lawmakers raised concerns this week about a deal for Google to acquire internal data from defunct carrier Spirit Airlines for $10 million to train artificial intelligence systems, according to reports. Google won an auction in August, as part of Spirit’s closure and asset liquidation, for material including spreadsheets, calendars and marketing, productivity and operations records. Spirit halted operations in May.
The lawmakers, led by a senator and a representative from the committees watching the issue, say the sale as described could sweep in an enormous volume of worker material: 100 million emails, 500 million chat messages and other employee records, according to their letter. They asked the company to exclude employee information from the transaction to the greatest extent possible.
A privacy ombudsman has recommended a bankruptcy judge approve the deal at an October 14 hearing, after excluding personal information belonging to some 97 million Spirit customers. Google says it does not want personal information, that anything it receives will be excluded or de-identified by an independent third party first, and that it is already working with the ombudsman.
The argument underneath is new. Bankruptcy sales have always moved customer lists and equipment; an archive rich enough to train AI models is a different kind of asset, and the workers who wrote those emails never consented to become training data. Lawmakers framed it plainly: innovation should not come at the expense of workers’ privacy or of information they had to provide as a condition of employment.
Whatever the judge decides on October 14 will be cited in the next case, and there will be a next case: failed companies now routinely leave behind data estates more valuable than their desks and servers. The rules written for liquidating airlines were not written for this, and Congress, on this week’s evidence, knows it.
The bankruptcy judge’s October 14 hearing will be watched by privacy lawyers as closely as by creditors. Data is now routinely the most valuable asset in a corporate failure, and every liquidation, an airline this year, perhaps a retailer or a health app next, will raise the same question the lawmakers posed: whether the people inside the data, employees and customers alike, get a say in what becomes of it after the company that collected it is gone.
US News Zone will continue to follow this story as further official information is confirmed.
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