Bidding war for defunct Spirit Airlines’ employee data will not die

The destiny of Spirit Airline’s data is still undecided, months after the company sought bankruptcy protection.

AI data company Micro1 has now offered $12.5 million to acquire a trove of the company’s emails, Teams chats, operations and employee productivity data, according to a report by aviation website Simply Flying,

It said the data includes about 600 million email and chat records generated by 17,000 employees, as well as 17 million OneDrive files, 20.5 million SharePoint items, and more than 30 million recorded customer service calls. Such a large repository of information is a gold mine to any company looking to train AI models more effectively. The report says that this data includes sensitive, decades-old employee and workplace records.

But Micro1’s offer comes weeks after Google acquired the data at auction, with its $10 million bid beating the $7.5 million offered by another AI training company, Mercor.

The airline’s former employees objected to the sale, and last week their unions took legal action to block the it.

Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, which continues to represent more than 5,500 of Spirit’s flight attendants, told Forbes that former flight attendants were unhappy about Spirit attempting to cash in on sensitive data when they still have not been paid their accrued vacation time, sick leave, and outstanding compensation.

However, this type of personal data is extremely valuable to the likes of Google. It means that AI models can be trained in more realistic scenarios. One option that is being explored is whether the data can be anonymized, which may offer a way forward to keep both sides happy.