Spirit Flight Attendants Win Privacy Shield in Google's $10M Data Deal

Spirit Airlines will hand Google its workers' data only after a third party scrubs it clean. Under a revised agreement reported this week, the airline must hire a data-de-identification firm called Tonic AI to strip out anything that could be tied to an individual consumer or employee, and to make sure the scrubbed records can't be traced back to specific people. Google has promised to keep the data in that de-identified form. A judge still has to sign off next week.

The fight started in August, when Spirit's representatives told a court the bankrupt carrier would sell decades of records to Google for $10 million. Google said personal information wasn't part of the package. The Association for Flight Attendants, which represents 55,000 workers, pushed back hard, arguing Google's safeguards wouldn't stop serious privacy violations — the pile includes 1.99 billion emails, 664 million Microsoft Teams messages, and employee travel and training files stretching back to 1986.

The cleaned-up version carves out a long list of sensitive material: employee medical records, documents tied to investigations and labor relations, and information on industry-wide safety management systems. In early November, an airline trade group warned that handing over safety data could make workers think twice about reporting hazards through voluntary programs, which the industry credits for US aviation's strong safety record.

Google also wrote itself an escape hatch. If Tonic's cleanup wipes out more than 8 percent of the assets, Google can walk away from the sale. The company didn't respond to a request for comment.

Sara Nelson, the union's president, told WIRED she never expected flight attendants to end up on the front line of AI and workers' rights. She pointed out that the job itself is hard to automate — replacing a flight attendant would take a high-functioning robot, and that's a long way off. Still, she said the case proves the problem follows workers everywhere: this is an issue even in jobs you'd think were most protected from AI.

Nelson isn't stopping at Spirit. She said the union will immediately start demanding worker-data-protection clauses in labor contracts at other carriers. If an airline won't meet those standards, she said, the union will shame it. The association has also begun meeting with state politicians about legislation that would write those protections into law. Ari Ezra Waldman, a UC Irvine School of Law professor who studies law and technology, called the proposed settlement a pretty good outcome for Spirit's employees and predicted unions will now negotiate privacy terms whenever data assets get sold — though he floated an easier fix: banning such sales outright. Tech leaders, meanwhile, keep pitching the bright side, with one executive telling WIRED this month that AI's abundance will make life better. Nelson's answer: workers aren't buying it, and the abundance story is a fantasyland of people in boardrooms with beanbags who wear hoodies.