Google $10m bid for bankrupt airline’s data and IP may stall after privacy challenge

Photo by Suhyeon Choi on Unsplash

Google’s $10m bid for a portfolio of data and related software put up for sale by collapsed US airline Spirit is on pause after an objection from the US-based Association of Flight Attendants-CWA (AFA), the trade body which represents Spirit cabin crew. 

Google has said it wants to use the data to train AI models. The search giant has committed itself to having the files scrubbed by a third party to ensure the removal of any related Personally Identifiable Information (PII), to ensure anonymity of any individual consumers covered by the dataset. But the AFA argues that while that may work for consumer information, it would not be impossible for AI to identity individual employees from shifts, location, flights and so on. 

The AFA objection filed in court clarifies its issues – that the dataset includes “decades of payroll, timekeeping, training, travel, and recruiting files, together with approximately 100 million emails, 80,000 email accounts, 17,082,644 OneDrive items, 20,577,677 SharePoint items, and 500,000,000 Teams items” and that Google’s commitment to screening out consumer PII is not enough. It wants the same screening to protect its members. 

The AFA-CWA’s concern here is that AI tools are now so powerful that there is a distinct possibility with a dataset like Spirit’s that actual individuals can effectively be identified by comparing the different subsets of information in the files. 

An article on Aras Technica explains: 

“If the Court does permit the sale to move forward, it should only approve the sale until at a minimum the same protections extended to consumers are extended to former Spirit flight attendants,” the AFA argued. That should include directly prohibiting Google from using worker data to “analyze, profile, evaluate, score, or draw conclusions regarding any individual Spirit flight attendant or any identifiable group or subgroup of Spirit flight attendants, and from attempting to re-associate the Deidentified Data with any Spirit employee.”  

The issue of how AI can ‘re-associate’ anonymised data with actual people is a major topic of debate right now. As an article on Bloomberg Law says: 

“Researchers have repeatedly demonstrated that seemingly anonymous datasets can often be re-identified when cross-referenced against publicly available information such as professional profiles, social media activity, geolocation records, or purchase histories. Techniques being used to re-identify individuals in previously anonymous data sets are becoming effective and available for public use. Researchers have been able to quantify re-identification risk of voting records, clinical data trials, and HIPAA-covered data. Reidentification capabilities demonstrated through such sensitive data indicates threat actors could apply similar mechanisms through readily available data sets.” 

Data and datasets are being increasingly recognised as key intangible assets which can have significant value, even when sold off as part of the bankruptcy procedures. Challenges over anonymisation of data may hit that value.