A U.S. bankruptcy court delayed the hearing on the proposed Google purchase of Spirit Airlines data, moving it from Oct. 14 to Nov. 6. The delay was noted in a notice submitted by Spirit’s legal team on Friday, following a request from Congressional Democrats to hold off on the transaction until additional safeguards are put in place.
The defunct carrier intends to sell its data assets for $10 million. Google has said it will use the data to improve its products and AI models, and that all data will be scrubbed of personally identifiable information before it is received.
On Oct. 8, a coalition of Democratic lawmakers dispatched a formal letter to both parties, urging a temporary halt until safeguards could be established to protect the personal data of Spirit employees. The correspondence was signed by 121 members of the Senate and the House, reflecting broad legislative concern over the handling of sensitive workforce data.
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The missive warned that even de-identified data sets can be reassembled, potentially compromising privacy. Lawmakers cited the capacity of modern AI systems to infer individual identities from patterns embedded within seemingly anonymous records, a risk they argued warranted careful mitigation.
“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 declared, led by Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Representative Steven Horsford of Nevada.
Google responded that any information it receives will first be stripped of personally identifiable details by an independent third party, as outlined in court filings. The company said it is not looking to buy any personal information and that the data will be de-identified before Google receives it.
