Google offers $10 million for Spirit’s “Deidentified Data”: hearing pushed to 9 September after union objection

The debtors of Spirit Aviation Holdings, Inc. held a virtual auction for the so‑called “Deidentified Data” on 14 August 2026, as recorded in the Notice of Auction Results filed the same day (ECF no. 1463, at 22:00:10) with the Bankruptcy Court for the Southern District of New York. In that notice Google LLC is named Successful Bidder with total consideration of $10,000,000 and Mercor.io Corporation Alternate Bidder at $7,500,000; the award remains subject to approval by bankruptcy judge Sean H. Lane. The approval hearing, initially set for 19 August at 11:00 Eastern with an objection deadline of 16:00 on 17 August, was postponed by the court to 9 September 2026: Reuters reported this on 18 August 2026, after the objection filed by the Association of Flight Attendants‑CWA (AFA‑CWA), the union representing Spirit’s cabin crew.

Spirit ceased operations in May 2026 under the weight of heavy debt and fuel costs; the Chapter 11 case had been opened on 29 August 2025 and the auction procedures were approved by the court on 22 June 2026 (ECF no. 1213).

The scope of the archive, as reconstructed by PPC Land from the exhibits to the Sale Agreement, includes roughly 100 million emails from about 80,000 Microsoft 365 accounts since 2018, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, 516 source code repositories totalling some 30 million lines, 175,658 employee records going back to 1986, around 7.25 billion observations of competitors’ fares and 7.5 billion passenger transactions; again according to PPC Land, what stays out is 97.5 million customer profiles, 50.2 million loyalty programme members, 15.8 million chat sessions, 30.9 million call recordings and the email marketing lists. These figures come from trade press and have not been checked line by line against the exhibits.

The AFA‑CWA union, which according to Forbes represents 5,500 Spirit flight attendants, is asking for restrictions on the sale of cabin crew data and additional safeguards for employees. In the objection, as reported by Reuters, the point contested above all is the clause requiring “referential integrity across the data set”: keeping the links between systems intact, the AFA‑CWA argues, would make it possible to reconstruct information about identifiable individuals or small groups. AFA‑CWA international president Sara Nelson, quoted by Forbes: “This is outrageous! We are filing an objection in court against Google’s attempt to buy data that should never be sold”.

In responses gathered by Forbes and Reuters, Google states that it will receive no personal information from the dataset; Spirit, quoted by Reuters, maintains that the records will be deidentified, with no customer information or personally identifiable data. Reuters also reports that Google intends to use the data for product development and to train its own AI models. According to Forbes, a court‑appointed ombudsman will oversee the deidentification process.

Substantive uncertainties remain: the sale is not yet approved, and the 9 September hearing may confirm it, amend it with safeguards, or reject it; Mercor.io remains the alternate buyer. The technical deidentification method is not public, the ombudsman’s identity is not known, nor is it clear how the promise of “no personal data” squares with the duty to preserve the links between records. In the background, a Chapter 11 sale “free and clear” would transfer the assets unencumbered, and what is on the table is not a customer list but the internal operating archive — emails, work chats, code, fares, staff records. On 9 September the court will say whether the promised anonymity holds alongside the obligation to preserve the connections.