Lawmakers warn Google could expose Spirit Airlines data in $10 million AI training deal

More than 100 members of Congress on Thursday sent a letter to the CEOs of Google and Spirit Airlines imploring them to halt a deal which would give the tech giant internal Spirit data in exchange for a $10 million payment to the failed carrier.

Google wants the data to train AI models and has said it will be deidentified. The proposed sale would include about 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, employment contracts, employee and timecard records and payroll and tax information, Rep. Steven Horsford (D-NV) said in a press release.

“While we understand that Google has stated that it will not receive personally identifiable information and that the data will undergo third-party scrubbing before its transfer, we are concerned that conventional de-identification safeguards may not be sufficient to protect employee privacy in the context of modern artificial intelligence,” the letter from 114 federal lawmakers said.

“Removing names, email addresses, or other direct identifiers does not necessarily make a dataset anonymous,” according to the letter, which was led by Horsford and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).

In Las Vegas, parts of which sit in Horsford’s district, almost 1,000 people lost their jobs at Spirit after it announced plans to shut down in May, the press release said.

If they choose to move forward with the deal, Google and Spirit should create a process for deidentifying the data that takes into account former employees’ feedback, exclude as much employee information as possible from the transfer, set limits on how the data can be used and conduct an “independent employee confidentiality review,” according to the press release.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Spirit is defunct and no press contact could be located.