Google's $10 million bid to buy old business data from Spirit Airlines so it can use it to train AI has hit turbulence

Spirit Airlines planes.

• Google won a bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines' internal business data for $10 million
• The package runs to roughly 100 million emails, 500 million Teams items, decades of payroll and crew records, and about 30 million lines of code, with customer and loyalty data excluded
• However the sale has stalled as a flight attendants' union says the privacy terms protect customers rather than employees, and a rival bidder has since offered $12.5 million

Google has successfully bid $10 million for what a court notice calls the 'Deidentified Data' of Spirit Airlines' parent company - but its bid to use the data to train AI models has run into a privacy debate.