Google Is Buying Spirit Airlines Data For $10 Million. The Flight Attendants Object.

Filed 5d ago · Via HuffPost · The Buffoon Desk

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Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

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Google won a bankruptcy auction to buy a chunk of Spirit Airlines' enterprise data for $10 million, including roughly 100 million emails, 17 million OneDrive items, 20.6 million SharePoint items, and 500 million Teams items, plus employee payroll and tax records. Google says the dataset excludes customer information and will help 'improve products and AI models.'

The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA has formally objected, arguing that 'deidentified' only addresses whether records name someone directly, not whether contents could still be reverse-engineered to identify individuals or small groups within Spirit's workforce. The union wants the sale blocked or, failing that, flight attendants extended the same protections as consumers.

Spirit shut down in May after 34 years, laying off 17,000 employees, and a Spirit spokesperson says a third party will certify the sold data as privacy-compliant. The next court hearing is September 9.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A company that stopped flying planes months ago is still finding new ways to monetize the people who used to work there, this time by selling their internal chats to the world's largest advertising company. Deidentified is a comforting word right up until someone with a spreadsheet and free time proves it isn't.

Source: Read the original at HuffPost → Scored: Umbrella Pants · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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