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

paxys 45 days ago |

> 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.

yahway 45 days ago | |

Doesn't matter. Same as Facebook or any other data hoarder. They use the data to manipulate society. This has always been the problem with personal data as the Red Herring.

euroderf 44 days ago | | |

USA: Hyperdetailed electronic information about you does not belong to you. EU: Well, it sorta does, altho we're still working out the kinks.

tenuousemphasis 44 days ago | | |

I was wondering if this is valuable for the mineable PII or for the AI training data? Maybe boyh.

jacquesm 45 days ago |

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.

pjc50 44 days ago | |

> upon bankruptcy all data will be destroyed

So, PBS should lose all their archives? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49333344

jacquesm 44 days ago | | |

There is always a way to interpret a comment in the worst possible way. I'm pretty sure you understood what I wrote.

falcor84 44 days ago | | |

There's a clear and significant difference between content that a company created itself, and the data they collected from their customers.

lazide 45 days ago | |

Worth a try, but just see how hard it is to get mining companies to clean up literal physical superfund sites.

How do you even prove all data was destroyed, let alone actually do it?

theodpHN 45 days ago |

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...

vineyardmike 44 days ago | |

For the 1.2B passengers: the transfer doesn’t contain passenger data, just internal operations data

Eg. Airline code, marketing materials, pricing histories, etc

Also, to answer the question:

> Affiliates and Acquisitions. We may share information with any corporate affiliates (e.g., parent company, sister companies, subsidiaries, joint ventures, or other companies under common control). If another company acquires, or plans to acquire, our company, business, or our assets, we will also share information with that company, including at the negotiation stage.

tough 44 days ago | |

on twitter I read data will be fully anonymized and scrubbed for PII before handover by a third party.

supposedly google intended purpose is to train LLM's for enterprise/office work etc

tonyedgecombe 44 days ago | | |

To train on the data from a company that went bankrupt?

nadermx 44 days ago | | |

What better way to train to bankrupting a company is there?

igregoryca 45 days ago |

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?

olalonde 44 days ago | |

In theory, a buyer could always execute that strategy after the sale, so it's essentially "priced in". By keeping the auction exclusive, the seller also keeps the possibility that the data is worth more to someone as an exclusive asset.

ygjb 45 days ago |

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.

geoduck14 45 days ago | |

The article mentions: a 3rd party company will scrub the data amd Google will promise not to attempt to reconstruct PII from the data.

That is good enough for me. If they violate their promise to the judge, the court can lay the hammer down on them

m4rtink 45 days ago | | |

Good, they never break promises, so it should be fine. It also implies you can reconstruct personal information from the data. Perfect.

DauntingPear7 45 days ago | | |

Maybe we can all be blessed with 2 quarters from a multi-year class action in a decade

lazide 45 days ago | | |

Don't forget the eventual settlement for $10 worth of coupons for purchases at the company.

squigz 45 days ago | | |

How is the court going to ensure they stick to that promise? Or is this basically just a pinky promise?

notabotiswear 45 days ago | | |

Yes, but did they _pinky promise?_

gessha 45 days ago | | |

Here, you dropped this: /s

Cider9986 45 days ago | | |

I love the /s

paxys 45 days ago |

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

robocat 45 days ago |

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

kevmo314 45 days ago | |

Maybe we can help businesses fail faster

geetee 45 days ago |

Ah, rare data hunters.

krackers 45 days ago | |

ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU4ByUbDKNc

kotaKat 44 days ago |

Is this just Enron Corpus 2.0?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron_Corpus

ChrisArchitect 44 days ago |

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...

kittikitti 45 days ago |

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.

lazide 45 days ago | |

The issue wasn't the fuel costs - it was their inability to adjust in time or effectively.

gib444 44 days ago |

Data protection laws are at best grossly insufficient, at worst a lie

emsign 45 days ago |

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

metalman 44 days ago |

title can be viewed as googles entire strategic planning objectives realised.

"google Wins!, Bankruptcy Auction"

fnord77 45 days ago |

gemini to get more profane