Google Will Pay $10M for Spirit Data After Privacy Protections

Google will pay $10 million for a vast trove of Spirit Airlines data after labor unions secured significant privacy protections for former employees.

The agreement, disclosed on Tuesday resolves objections that had stalled the sale of the bankrupt carrier’s digital archives.

The deal, which awaits final approval from the U.S. Bankruptcy Court of New York on November 17, requires the exclusion of 20 categories of sensitive employee records. Excluded materials include medical and disability history, drug and alcohol testing results, disciplinary files, and payroll information.

“an historic win for worker privacy protections,” the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA), part of the 500,000-member strong Communications Workers of America (CWA), AFL-CIO, said regarding the deal that it spearheaded the opposition alongside other labor organizations including the Air Line Pilots Association. The Allied Pilots Association, representing more than 700 former Spirit pilots, also filed objections.

“Worker data privacy in the age of AI has become a whole new worker’s rights issue,” said Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA. “Without our union, there would have been no one to speak for workers in this fire sale of their private information. We fought and we won brand new protections.”

The dispute centered on the sale of assets from Spirit Airlines, which ceased operations in May 2026. In August, Google won an auction for the airline’s internal data, which includes roughly 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams records, 17.1 million OneDrive files, 20.6 million SharePoint files, 667,563 IT tickets, and an entire codebase, alongside corporate records dating back to 1986.

Lucy Thomson, a Washington, D.C.-based cybersecurity specialist, attorney, and court-appointed privacy ombudsman, concluded in a nine-page report to the court that Spirit and Google had taken consequential steps to provide privacy protections for consumers, while personal information concerning 97 million Spirit customers was excluded.

“The information will either be completely excluded or will be de-identified by an independent third party before Google receives any data,” Google said, and under the revised terms, Spirit must hire an independent third-party firm, Tonic AI, to perform a rigorous de-identification process on the remaining data.

This process must adhere to ISO 27559, an international standard for privacy-enhancing data de-identification. U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Sean Lane scheduled a court hearing for November 17 in White Plains, New York, to review the sale.

The sale has been a focal point for federal lawmakers. In October, 121 members of Congress, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Steven Horsford, raised concerns regarding the potential misuse of employee data, writing in an October 8 letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Spirit CEO Dave Davis about voluntary safety programs like Line Operations Safety Assessments.

The $10 million purchase price remains unchanged from the original auction bid, though rival AI training-data startup micro1 previously filed a late $12.5 million offer. The agreement includes an opt-out clause, allowing Google to renege on the sale if the required data-cleaning process reduces the total volume of assets by more than 8 percent.

“Now we will take this issue to all of our employers to secure contractual protections, and demand lawmakers protect workers everywhere through federal and state law,” Nelson said.

More on Google: Google Messages Scam Protection Data: What Is Actually Sent · Google Cloud Outage Disrupts Revolut and U.K. Banking Services · Google brings Gemini assistant to Google Maps on Apple CarPlay