Spirit Airlines union deal would remove staff data from Google sale

In short: Google and the flight attendants’ union reached a proposed deal to remove sensitive employee details from Spirit Airlines data being sold to Google.

What happened

Spirit Airlines, which has been going through liquidation after it stopped operating earlier this year, planned to sell decades of company data to Google for $10 million. The data includes huge archives of workplace communications and records, such as billions of emails and hundreds of millions of Microsoft Teams messages, going back to 1986.

Google said it would not receive personal information. But the Association for Flight Attendants, a 55,000-member union, argued the original protections were not enough to prevent privacy problems for workers.

Under the revised agreement, Spirit must hire a third-party company called Tonic AI to “de-identify” the data. De-identify means removing details that can point to a specific person, like taking names and other clues off documents so they look more like anonymous examples. Tonic is also tasked with making sure the cleaned data cannot be linked back to individuals later, and Google has said it will keep the data in this de-identified form.

The deal would also exclude some especially sensitive materials, including employee medical records, documents tied to investigations and labor relations, and certain aviation safety system records. A judge still needs to approve the settlement next week.

Why it matters

Workplace emails and messages can contain private details, even when they were written for the job. This agreement is an early example of workers, through a union, negotiating rules for how their data can be sold and reused, especially when that data could be used to improve AI systems.

Source: Wired