Spirit’s privacy ombudsman backs Google’s $10m data deal

The privacy official in Spirit Airlines’ bankruptcy has recommended approval of the sale of deidentified Spirit Airlines data to Google. In a report filed on 5 October, ombudsman Lucy Thomson said Spirit and Google had taken passenger databases out of the deal.

Google won the auction with a $10m bid, Business Insider reported. A hearing on the sale is scheduled for 14 October. The court has the final say.

How the sale got here

Spirit stopped flying on 2 May. Google won the data auction in August, with Mercor as the alternate bidder.

On 3 September, AI training company micro1 filed notice of a competing bid. Thomson filed her first report to the court on 8 September. Unions for Spirit’s flight attendants and pilots have objected to the sale, as has software maker Springshot. The union for American Airlines pilots joined them last week, Business Insider reported.

What changed

Spirit and Google have agreed to exclude booking and transaction records, refunds, inflight purchases and WiFi sales, the new report says. That data will not reach Google “in any form”, the report says. The sale still includes corporate email, which may hold passengers’ personal details.

Spirit has hired Tonic.ai to deidentify that unstructured data, according to the report. The agent must file a certification with the court before every transfer. Thomson asked that it also state how many passengers’ details it found and removed.

The buyer must publicly commit not to try to reidentify the data. It also may not pass it on unless the recipient makes the same commitment. The report says this cuts the risk to the 97 million people who booked with Spirit:

“The potential privacy losses or costs to consumers have been eliminated or mitigated.”
Lucy Thomson, consumer privacy ombudsman, report to the court

What the report does not cover

Thomson did not assess whether the sale poses risks to Spirit’s employees or third parties. If the court considers Mercor instead, she wants to look into a security incident at the company earlier this year. She also wants to review micro1’s plan to deidentify the data itself rather than use an independent party.

Google has said it is not buying any personal information from Spirit. It said the data would help improve its products and its AI models. Google did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment on the report.