Google wins $10M bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines' emails and chats
Google wins bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines emails, chats, documents
Google has won a bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines' business data, including 100 million emails and 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, for $10 million. The data, which excludes personal information and passenger profiles, will be deidentified and used to improve Google's products and AI models. A federal judge must still approve the deal, with AI hiring platform Mercor as the backup bidder at $7.5 million.
We acquired part of an enterprise dataset from Spirit Airlines, which can be helpful in improving our products and AI models.
- paxys
> The data does not contain any personally identifiable information, according to a court filing by PJT Partners vice president Dylan Friesner, an investment banker for Spirit.
> The data will be "deidentified" — meaning that it won't be associated with individual people and the buyer agrees not to attempt to re-identify the users.
Sure, 100 million emails and 500 million chats totally won’t have any mention of customers. No employee has ever shared PII on email or chat. Their redaction is guaranteed to work correctly. Nothing to see here.
- jacquesm
It's high time we get signed warrants that upon bankruptcy all data will be destroyed so it won't be used to make good either the creditors or the shareholders of the company that went under. I can't imagine any good outcome here, and change of control should result in an automatic withdrawal of any consent, no matter what assurances of privacy are given by the buyer.
- theodpHN
Anyone see Google's intended use of the collected data spelled out in the "Primary Purpose for Collection and Use of Data" in the Spirit Privacy Agreement? Asking for 1.2 billion Spirit passengers. https://content.spirit.com/Shared/en-us/Documents/Privacy_Po...
- ygjb
I would love to see a rider from the courts mandating a significant third party test by privacy researchers to see if the deidentified data can be reconstructed from models post training.
- igregoryca
As someone not super familiar with bankruptcy procedure: why do they auction off exclusive access to the data? Couldn't they make more money by, say, taking the top N offers, where N is "small" (e.g., ≤5)? Or does that depress the price too much?