Spirit Airlines stopped flying earlier this year, and its inbox turned out to be worth money. Google planned to buy decades of Spirit's data for $10 million, and Wired says the flight attendants' records in that sale include 1.99 billion emails. Your company's chat logs are an AI asset now, and you need a rule for them before a buyer or a court writes one for you.
This week Google and the Association for Flight Attendants, a 55,000-member union, reached a deal over that sale, Wired reported. Wired calls it a first-of-its-kind deal. It's part of Spirit's liquidation, and a judge still has to approve it next week.
The fight started in August. In a legal brief, Spirit's representatives said the airline would sell decades' worth of data to Google for $10 million. According to Wired, the flight attendants' records in the sale include 1.99 billion emails, 664 million Microsoft Teams messages, and travel and training information, all going back to 1986. Google said it wouldn't receive personal information. The union argued that Google's proposed safeguards wouldn't prevent serious privacy violations.
The revised deal adds guardrails. Spirit has to hire Tonic AI, a data de-identification company, to strip out anything that could be tied to individual consumers or employees. Tonic AI also has to make sure the cleaned data can't be relinked to specific people, and Google has promised to keep it in that de-identified form. Medical records, files on employee investigations and labor relations, and information about industry-wide safety management systems are out entirely. That last cut follows an argument from an airline trade group in early November, which said including that information could make workers less willing to report safety issues through voluntary programs.
There's an exit door for Google, too. If the cleaning shrinks the assets by more than 8 percent, Google can back out of the sale. Google didn't respond to Wired's request for comment.
Your inbox has a resale value
Most companies treat internal chatter as exhaust: the reply-all threads, the Teams pings about shift swaps, the training sign-offs nobody reads twice. A $10 million price tag turns that exhaust into something with a buyer. Wired reports there's now a multibillion-dollar industry that buys and sells work files and emails for companies trying to improve AI models. Spirit showed what that market does when it meets a liquidation.
The rules weren't built for this. Wired notes that data privacy laws tend to focus on consumer protections and rarely consider workers' rights. The flight attendants got protections because they had a union willing to fight the sale. Sara Nelson, the union's president, told Wired: “What this shows is that this is an issue even in jobs you think are most protected from AI. This is an issue for everyone.”
Ari Ezra Waldman, a professor at the UC Irvine School of Law, called the settlement “a pretty good outcome” for Spirit's employees. “From now on, unions will know to negotiate to protect the privacy rights in the event of future sales of data assets,” he wrote in an email to Wired. He also pointed to banning the sale of this data altogether as another, maybe easier, option.
Google says it isn't getting personal information, a third party will scrub the data, and the most sensitive files are excluded. Wired reports that tech leaders argue workers understand their information will train AI that makes their lives better and easier. “You have to think of the upside, the abundance that AI can result in,” one unnamed executive told Wired this month. A skeptic could also say this is a bankruptcy oddity, since healthy companies don't sell their inboxes.
Every safeguard in this deal was won after the sale was announced, by people with bargaining power. It's also unproven that de-identification works. Wired says the process only 'might reliably' separate workers' data from personal information. Picture an email archive where people sign off with their name, their base, and a note about their kid's school play, then ask how clean 'clean' can get. I read the 8 percent clause as a sign of what the buyer values most, which is volume. As for the bankruptcy point, no company plans to be liquidated. Liquidation is the moment when nobody inside is left to argue about what the data was for.
What to check this month
- Retention. Spirit's records reached back to 1986. Ask IT how far back your email and chat archives go, and whether anyone chose that on purpose. Data you've deleted can't be sold.
- Your written policy. Ask counsel whether your employee privacy notice, handbook, and deal documents say anything about selling or licensing internal communications for AI training. If they're silent, someone else gets to fill the gap.
- Labor talks. Nelson said the union will immediately start demanding worker-data clauses in other airlines' labor agreements, and it's meeting with state politicians about legislation. “If you're not willing to meet these standards for your workers, we're going to shame you,” she told Wired. If you have unionized staff, expect this request. If you don't, writing a policy now is cheaper than writing one under pressure.
The ruling next week
The first test is the judge's decision next week. If it's approved, this deal becomes the template that buyers and unions point to. The second test is the 8 percent clause. If Google walks away because the cleaning cut too deep, buyers want worker data mostly when it's raw, and the case for a policy gets stronger. Then watch the statehouses, where the union says it's already pushing for worker data protections.
My bet is that within a year, worker-data clauses show up in labor contracts outside aviation. Acquirers will start asking about chat and email archives during due diligence the same way they ask about customer lists. When yours asks, will you have an answer on paper?