Google’s attempt to buy Spirit Airlines’ data might come unstuck
Google LLC’s artificial intelligence researchers had been salivating at the prospect of getting their hands on a trove of business data acquired from the defunct airline Spirit Airlines Inc. in an auction, but the proposed deal is being challenged by two separate parties.
On Wednesday, the bankruptcy court that initially approved Google’s $10 million purchase of Spirit Airlines’ data agreed to temporarily halt the transaction after former flight attendants objected to the deal, saying it could violate their privacy. Then today, an AI training data startup called Micro1 Inc. came forward with a last minute attempt to trump Google’s bid with a higher offer.
Google won the auction of Spirit’s digital archives last week. The records include decades of payroll, travel and recruiting files, along with around 100 million emails, 80,000 email accounts and millions of additional digital items. When Google’s winning bid was announced, it said it intends to use the information to improve its AI models, and promised that any personal customer data would be excluded from the purchase.
The court made sure of that. As part of the deal, Google was forced to agree to use a court-appointed ombudsman to oversee a “de-identification” process that would ensure the dataset was stripped of any personally identifiable information pertaining to Spirit’s customers, before it was given to Google. In addition, Google had to agree to never intentionally attempt to re-identify the data.
