More than 120 US lawmakers urge Spirit Airlines and Google to protect workers' data in a proposed AI training data sale

More than 120 members of the US Senate and House have written to the chief executives of Google and Spirit Airlines urging them to protect the privacy of thousands of current and former Spirit employees in the proposed $10 million sale of Spirit's internal data to Google for training AI systems, according to a 9 October release from Senator Maria Cantwell, ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee. The letter, dated 8 October, says publicly available court findings show the sale would involve approximately 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, employee records, timecard records, payroll and tax information, and employment contracts. It notes that Google has stated it will not receive personally identifiable information and that the data will undergo third-party scrubbing, but warns that removing names, email addresses and other direct identifiers does not necessarily make a dataset anonymous. The lawmakers ask the companies to exclude employee information as far as possible, agree a de-identification protocol with affected workers, set up an independent confidentiality review with enforceable limits on downstream use, prohibit profiling identifiable groups of workers, and exclude information from voluntary aviation safety programmes. They say no employee-related information should be transferred until such protections are in place.

What it means for business: the letter creates no legal obligation, but organisations selling or buying internal communications or HR data for AI training should expect scrutiny of whether de-identification really protects employees.