Today, Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Steven Horsford led a joint Congressional letter – signed by 121 U.S. Senators and Representatives – to Google CEO Sundar Pichai and Spirit CEO Dave Davis sounding the alarm on the Members’ “serious concern” about the proposed $10 million sale of Spirit Airlines’ internal data to Google to train artificial intelligence systems. The unprecedented sale is a pivotal moment in the fight to protect all workers’ data and privacy as technology advances unchecked from regulation.
“This sale presents uncharted territory,” the Members of Congress write. “…the proposed sale would involve an extraordinary volume of Spirit’s internal records, including approximately 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, employee records, timecard records, payroll and tax information, and employment contracts. This information was created and provided in the context of an employment relationship and may contain highly sensitive information about individual workers.”
The just-released letter lays out clear demands from Members of Congress on critical actions Google and Spirit Airlines must take to protect worker data and establish meaningful, enforceable safeguards. As the Members highlight, “Consumers have more privacy protections than workers, yet Spirit has collected far more private information about its employees than about its customers.”
“Spirit Flight Attendants and other former employees are on the tip of the spear of this new threat to workers’ rights,” said Sara Nelson, president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, representing 55,000 Flight Attendants at 20 airlines including Spirit. “Senator Warren, Representative Horsford and 119 of their colleagues, with very little time and without either chamber in session, acted quickly to urge protections for workers as they face immediate risk in the bankruptcy court. But the outcome of conditions on this proposed sale to Google carries tremendous implications for workers across the economy. We thank the lawmakers for their swift action in their oversight role, as they recognize the immediate concern for our Spirit members. Flight Attendants across the industry and workers across the economy also thank them for recognizing the dangerous precedent it could set in this new frontier of unregulated AI and the intrusion of privacy for all Americans.”
The Members continue, “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.”
The new letter comes just ahead of the next scheduled hearing in the Spirit Airlines bankruptcy proceedings. And the letter also comes on the heels of a new amicus brief from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) supporting the union’s objection to the sale of workers’ private data. As EPIC lays out in their brief, “the risk of exposure by inference is greater than ever given recent advances in artificial intelligence,” emphasizing that the AFA’s concern that “confidential information could be exposed, even after deidentification, is very real.”
Additionally, as we enter uncharted territory with an unprecedented attempt to purchase an immense amount of personal employee data, EPIC also reasserts that “proceeding with the sale as proposed would create perverse incentives for employers to over-collect employee data.” The first-of-its-kind proposed sale is a watershed moment for workers’ rights, privacy, and protection as we see ever growing technological advancements with no regulation.
A full copy of the letter can be found here.
