Google buys crashed airline Spirit's data at auction, because AI
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Google bought bankrupt Spirit Airlines' data at auction for $10 million to train AI.
Google acquired Spirit Airlines' data for $10 million at a liquidation auction, including 100 million emails, 30 million recorded customer calls, 500 million Teams messages, 17 million OneDrive files, and operational data from 763,000 flights. The data was deidentified before sale, with Google promising to scrub any remaining PII. Google said it will use the data to improve AI services; the underbidder was AI training data company Mercor.
What commenters are saying
Commenters are deeply skeptical that the data is truly deidentified, calling the promise to remove PII "trust me bro" and noting that correlation with other datasets could reidentify individuals. Some point out that privacy policies don't survive bankruptcy. Others draw parallels to the Enron email corpus and express concern about this becoming a precedent for selling customer data to AI companies. A few commenters focus on the legal and ethical implications for consent.