The spokesperson said this after more than 100 U.S. lawmakers called on the CEOs of Spirit Airlines and Google to halt the transfer of information related to former Spirit employees until protections are in place to prevent it from being misused.
The lawmakers made this call in a letter addressed to Spirit Airlines CEO Dave Davis and Google CEO Sundar Pichai and signed by 119 members of Congress led by Rep. Steven Horsford, D-Nev., and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., according to a Thursday (Oct. 8) press release issued by Horsford’s office.
PYMNTS reported in August that after Spirit Airlines shut down in May, in its second Chapter 11 bankruptcy in two years, Google paid $10 million at auction for the internal digital record of how the airline operated, including about 100 million employee emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, 17 million OneDrive files, 20 million SharePoint items and 516 code repositories holding 30 million lines of custom software.
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This material has value to artificial intelligence companies because it is proprietary or “real-world” data that can be used to train large language models to handle complex business tasks, the PYMNTS report said.
Reuters reported Thursday that on Monday (Oct. 5), a privacy ombudsman recommended that a U.S. bankruptcy judge approve the sale of the data at an Oct. 14 hearing, provided that the personal information from Spirit customers is excluded.
The lawmakers who signed the letter to the CEOs of Spirit and Google said that the data may include sensitive information about former Spirit employees, such as medical information and accommodation requests, disciplinary files and compensation information, according to the press release.
The letter urges the companies to take measures to exclude and protect this data before it is transferred, per the release.
Horsford said in the release that former Spirit employees did not hand over their information “so it could be sold to train a different company’s AI” and that they should not have to worry about their data “being used by a company they never worked for.”
“Innovation cannot come at the expense of workers’ privacy, and no employee data should move until real, enforceable safeguards are in place,” Horsford said.
Reached by PYMNTS on Thursday, a Google spokesperson said in an emailed statement: “As we’ve said from the beginning of the process, we are not looking to buy any personal information from Spirit. The information will either be completely excluded or will be deidentified by an independent third party before Google receives any data. We’re already working constructively with the appointed privacy ombudsman.”
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