Cantwell, Colleagues Urge Spirit Airlines & Google to Protect Workers' Privacy Amid Sale of Data for AI Training

Legislators call for halt in employee data transfer until privacy protections are enacted

EDMONDS, WA - U.S. Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA), ranking member of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation and senior member of the Finance Committee, joined her House and Senate colleagues in a letter to Spirit Airlines CEO, Dave Davis, and Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, urging the companies to protect the privacy of thousands of former Spirit employees.

The letter responds to the proposed $10 million sale of Spirit's internal data to Google for the purpose of training artificial intelligence systems. Court findings revealed that the proposed sale would include approximately 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, employee records, timecards records, payroll and tax information, and employment contracts. Workers created and provided this information as a condition of their employment, and it may contain highly sensitive details, including medical information and accommodation requests.

"This sale presents uncharted territory," wrote the legislators. "Innovation should not come at the expense of workers' privacy or the confidentiality of information they were required to provide as a condition of employment. The unprecedented scale and sophistication of modern artificial intelligence make it particularly important that privacy protections keep pace with the technology."

Sen. Cantwell and her colleagues called for no employee-related information to be transferred until protections are in place to ensure that workers' sensitive information cannot be identified, profiled, or misused.

The letter also warned that removing names, email addresses, and other direct identifiers does not necessarily make a dataset anonymous, particularly when modern AI systems can identify patterns across large datasets and connect seemingly unrelated pieces of information. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has recognized that de-identified data can be re-identified in certain circumstances.

The legislators urged the companies to initiate an independent review and create enforceable restrictions governing the use of sensitive employee information.

Sen. Cantwell was joined by Sens. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT), Lisa Blunt Rochester (D-DE), Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Tammy Duckworth (D-IL), Mark Kelly (D-AZ), Ed Markey (D-MA), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), Raphael Warnock (D-GA), Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and 108 House members in co-signing the letter. Several unions have also expressed their support for the letter.

The full text of the letter can be found HERE.