Lawmakers urge Google and Spirit to halt $10 million AI data deal over worker privacy

More than 100 federal lawmakers on October 8 urged Google and Spirit Airlines to stop employee-related data from changing hands without privacy protections. Led by Rep. Steven Horsford and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the intervention targets a proposed $10 million sale of Spirit’s internal records to Google for training artificial intelligence systems.

Horsford’s office said court findings describe an archive containing approximately 100 million emails and 500 million Microsoft Teams messages. The proposed transfer also includes employment contracts, employee records, timecards, payroll records and tax information—not just communications about running the airline.

The office warned that these records may contain medical information and requests for workplace accommodations. Employees created or supplied the information as a condition of their jobs. That distinction underpins the lawmakers’ objection: material collected for employment would be transferred to another company for AI training.

The appeal concerns former workers already facing the loss of their jobs. Nearly 1,000 people in Las Vegas were laid off from Spirit, according to Horsford’s office. Its release calls for no employee-related information to be transferred until protections against identification, profiling and misuse are in place.

Spirit’s workers handed over this information because their jobs required it, not so it could be sold to train a different company’s AI

Rep. Steven Horsford

Removing names is not the whole safeguard

Google has said it will not receive personally identifiable information and that an outside party will scrub the data before transfer, according to the congressional release. The lawmakers challenge whether that process—known as de-identification—can adequately protect employees when the resulting archive is used by modern AI systems.

Their concern is that removing names, email addresses and other direct identifiers does not necessarily make records anonymous. AI systems can connect patterns across large datasets, the lawmakers warn. Their release also cites the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s recognition that de-identified data can be re-identified in some circumstances.

Restrictions would follow the data

The lawmakers’ requests extend beyond the initial cleanup. They want limits on what happens after transfer, alongside a smaller employee-data footprint and a role for affected workers in designing the protections. Specifically, they ask the companies to:

• Exclude employee information wherever possible, including payroll, timecards and Microsoft 365 content containing flight attendant information.
• Develop de-identification rules with worker input and retain heightened protections for disciplinary files, medical requests and compensation information.
• Commission an independent employee confidentiality review and impose enforceable limits on subsequent use, disclosure, retention and transfer.
• Prohibit using the data to identify, profile, evaluate or draw inferences about identifiable groups of workers.

Labor leaders also raised a concern beyond individual privacy: confidential safety reporting. Air Line Pilots Association president Jason Ambrosi warned that airline workers’ willingness to report problems depends on trust that their reports stay confidential. He argued that breaking that trust could discourage reporting.

Google did not immediately respond to The Record’s request for comment. The congressional intervention asks for safeguards; it does not announce that the proposed sale has been stopped.