Your Work Chats Could Outlive Your Job
A failed airline wants to sell its workers' emails and chats to Google for AI training. Removing names is not the same as keeping secrets, and a judge will decide.
Your work chats could outlive your job. That is the lesson of a fight over Spirit Airlines, the budget carrier that shut down in May. Its bankruptcy estate wants to sell Google a huge archive of company data for $10 million to help train AI.
A schedule filed in court in August listed about 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams items and decades of personnel records, including payroll files. Google says it is not buying personal information and that the data will be excluded or scrubbed by an independent firm before it receives anything. A court-appointed privacy ombudsman backed the sale on October 5, though she noted she did not study the risks to employees.
Names Out, Secrets In
On October 8, 121 members of Congress, led by Rep. Steven Horsford and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, warned that "removing names, email addresses, or other direct identifiers does not necessarily make a dataset anonymous." Unions for Spirit's flight attendants and pilots have also objected in court.
Here is why. A message with no name can still mention a home base, a route, a sick day and a manager. Put enough of those clues together and a person, or an AI, can work out who wrote it. That is called re-identification, and the bigger the pile of data, the easier it gets.
A judge will decide. The hearing, once set for October 14, has been pushed back to November 6. A rival bidder, micro1, says it plans to offer $12.5 million.
Clean Out the Archive
For employers, the lesson is simple. Know what sits in your email and chat archives, keep it only as long as you truly need it, and delete the rest. Old files can become an asset that a future owner tries to sell.
For workers, assume your workplace messages could last for decades. Keep medical and personal matters out of company chat whenever you can.
Sources
- Office of Rep. Steven Horsford, Spirit Airlines to Sell Employee Data to Train Google AI, Horsford and Warren Lead Call for Worker Privacy Protections, October 8, 2026
- U.S. Senate Commerce Committee, Letter to Google and Spirit Airlines on the sale of employee data, October 8, 2026
- The Record, Lawmakers warn Google could expose Spirit Airlines data in $10 million AI training deal, October 8, 2026
- ComplexDiscovery via LexBlog, Lawmakers press Google and Spirit on employee data before a hearing on a $10 million AI training data sale, October 9, 2026
- Miami Herald, Spirit Airlines wants to sell employee data to Google, October 10, 2026
- Travel Weekly, Congressional concerns delay Google-Spirit data transfer, October 2026
- U.S. Bankruptcy Court, S.D.N.Y., Consumer Privacy Ombudsman Supplemental Report on the Sale of Deidentified Data, October 5, 2026