Cybersecurity Policy Report, Google’s Plans for Airline’s Data Prompts Privacy Warning From 121 Lawmakers, (Oct 9, 2026)
Google LLC’s proposed $10 million purchase of the assets of bankrupt Spirit Airlines—mainly to obtain data to train AI (artificial intelligence)—has prompted warnings from lawmakers and labor unions about the threat to former Spirit employees’ privacy.
“This sale presents uncharted territory. According to publicly available court findings, the proposed sale would involve an extraordinary volume of Spirit’s internal records, including approximately 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, employee records, timecard records, payroll and tax information, and employment contracts,” 121 members of Congress said yesterday in a letter to the chief executive officers of Google and Spirit.
“While we understand that Google has stated that it will not receive personally identifiable information and that the data will undergo third-party scrubbing before its transfer, we are concerned that conventional de-identification safeguards may not be sufficient to protect employee privacy in the context of modern artificial intelligence,” they said.
“Removing names, email addresses, or other direct identifiers does not necessarily make a dataset anonymous,” they noted.
They asked the CEOs to exclude “employee training records, timecards, payroll information, and Microsoft 365 content containing flight attendant information” before the dataset is transferred.
In addition, Google and Spirit should establish “a meaningful de-identification protocol agreed upon by the affected workers” and protect “sensitive employee information even when it has been de-identified,” the lawmakers said.
“Employee information should not be treated as non-sensitive simply because direct identifiers have been removed. Spirit and Google should ensure that disciplinary records, training deficiencies, medical or accommodation requests, compensation information, and other sensitive employment information receive heightened protections,” they said.
“Innovation should not come at the expense of workers’ privacy or the confidentiality of information they were required to provide as a condition of employment,” the lawmakers told the CEOs.
“The unprecedented scale and sophistication of modern artificial intelligence make it particularly important that privacy protections keep pace with the technology. We therefore urge Google and Spirit to address these concerns and establish meaningful, enforceable safeguards before the proposed transaction proceeds,” they added.
Rep. Steven Horsford (D., Nev.) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) were the lead signatories on the letter. “Spirit’s workers handed over this information because their jobs required it, not so it could be sold to train a different company’s AI,” Rep. Horsford said in a news release.
“In Las Vegas alone, nearly 1,000 people were laid off from Spirit. They should not have to worry about their payroll records, disciplinary files, and private messages 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,” he said.
Rep. Horsford’s news release included comments from several labor union leaders, including Jason Ambrosi, president of the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA).
“Spirit's workers shared personal information because their jobs required it, not so it could be sold to train AI,” Mr. Ambrosi said. “Google and Spirit must put real, enforceable protections in place before a single employee record changes hands."
ALPA is one of several organizations that filed objections to the proposed transfer in U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York, which is overseeing Spirit’s Chapter 11 case. The court has given preliminary approval to the Google-Spirit transaction.
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