Google bids $10M to win data from bankrupt Spirit Airlines

There were more than one interested party in the lost data

After filing for bankruptcy, the American carrier Spirit Airlines saw its data put up for auction, with Google offering $10 million to acquire it. 

The transaction is now subject to a court ruling initiated by the airline's flight attendants' union.

Will Google one day buy the conversations you have with your colleagues? The company won the auction for a portion of Spirit Airlines' data after its bankruptcy filing. The lot includes approximately 10 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams conversations and recordings, and 7.5 billion passenger transactions since 2008, according to Forbes. Google also acquired pricing data for approximately 7.2 billion competing flights.

Through fears of privacy concern violations, data including nearly 100 million passenger profiles and some 50 million records related to the former airline’s Free Spirit loyalty program will not be included and up for grabs in the deal.

With this data, Google plans to improve its products and AI models. The American giant, which possesses a vast amount of public data, wants to acquire data describing real decisions made within an actual airline and accessible through internal conversations. 

The Lauderdale-based company, crippled by soaring kerosene prices after years of accumulated difficulties, announced its intention to cease operations, in early May of this year.

In the battle to win the auctioned data, the American giant faced competition from Mercor, a start-up specialising in providing human experts to train AI models, which was also interested in this wealth of data.

What does is this move indicative of for the industry? Firstly that data was property up for sale after a collapse of a business and secondly that more than one company was hoping to win this sale, including one of the most famous.

For now, the agreement stipulates that a third party will now be appointed to anonymise this data, and Google commits to maintaining its anonymity so to quell any fresh privacy concerns. 

The AFA-CWA, the union representing the approximately 5,500 flight attendants of Spirit Airlines, does not appear entirely reassured by these provisions and has filed a lawsuit to ensure that confidential information and employee profiles are excluded from the transaction. 

Google will have to wait for a hearing scheduled for September 9, 2026, though, to validate this transaction, according to smarttrabel.news.