Spirit Sells Off Customer Data to Google

Following the bankruptcy declaration by Spirit Airlines in May and the subsequent selling of all its assets in bankruptcy court auctions to pay off its roughly $8.1 billion in debt, Google just bought all of its data assets for $10 million. The data reportedly includes 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams chats, 7.2 billion records for competitors' flights, 7.5 billion passenger transaction records, more than 175,000 employee records, and other records related to aircraft operations, employee productivity, revenue, audits and fraud, marketing campaigns, project management, and pricing.

Google said it plans to use the massive amounts of data to train its artificial intelligence models, which has set off a firestorm of controversy for the tech giant. While tech titans like Google look to get their hands on mountains of data to make their AI models more accurate and capable, customer privacy advocates are raising red flags.

"Google's acquisition of Spirit Airlines' digital assets, including customer-service data, to train its [large language models] puts a whole new spin on the phrase, 'This call will be recorded for training and monitoring purposes,' warns Adi Tahiri, chief technology officer at Konecta, a customer service outsourcer.

Tahiri also points out that the deal would not pass muster in Europe, where data protections are much more stringent than in the United States.

"Although customers may be told that calls are recorded for training purposes, selling those recordings to a third party to train its AI models represents a change in how the data is used," he says, pointing out the under the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation, "that would create significant legal and regulatory barriers."

Tahiri also cautions that because Spirit Airlines is now defunct, it no longer has any ongoing service obligation to customers. The deal, he said, "focused on recovering value for creditors rather than the longer-term implications of selling the data."

Nonetheless, Tahiri and others maintain that this just further proves just how valuable customer data can be.

"Customer-service data is undoubtedly a treasure trove for training LLMs. An airline's data may be particularly valuable, not only because it is rich with real conversations, but it is also highly varied, encompassing conversations across multiple languages, demographics and regions," Tahiri says.

David Fischer, chief revenue officer at Luware, agrees.

"The fact that Google has acquired a large dataset of deidentified airline customer-service interactions to support AI development highlights just how valuable conversational data has become," he says.

Fischer, however, emphasizes that the Google-Spirit deal should serve as a reminder to companies of all sorts.

"Most organizations are already sitting on this golden opportunity within their own contact centers. Every call, chat, and customer interaction can fuel an AI feedback loop, helping teams identify recurring issues, improve self-service, better support agents, and continuously refine the customer experience," he says. "Businesses do not necessarily need to spend millions to buy vast external datasets to realize this value. With the right privacy safeguards, governance, and human oversight in place, they can responsibly use the interactions they already have to make both their service and their AI better over time."