Google wins bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines emails, chats, documents

robocat

Using data from failed businesses as training data: what could go wrong?

geetee

Ah, rare data hunters.

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?

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...

emsign

So Google is training AI to run businesses that go bankrupt now? That's not very smart.

fnord77

gemini to get more profane

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.

paxys

Talking like a middle management drone from a failed corporation is perfectly on brand for Google AI.

kittikitti

Sad that an affordable airline had to dissolve from increased fuel costs due to America and Israel's wars. Google isn't the right company to capitalize on their data but now their competitors don't have it. This is what happens with Big Tech goes unchecked and their AI can swallow an entire airline.

ChrisArchitect

In related airline/Google AI data business, just last week: Ryanair and Google Cloud Announce Five-Year Data and AI Partnership https://www.googlecloudpresscorner.com/2026-08-12-Ryanair-an...