Cortez Masto, Horsford Call for Worker Privacy Protections as Spirit Airlines Plans to Sell Employee Data to Train Google AI

Las Vegas, Nev. – U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto (D-Nev.) joined Congressman Steven Horsford (D-Nev.-04) in urging Spirit Airlines CEO Dave Davis and Google CEO Sundar Pichai to protect the privacy of thousands of former Spirit employees. The letter responds to the proposed $10 million sale of Spirit’s internal data to Google for the purpose of training artificial intelligence (AI) systems. “According to publicly available court findings, 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,” the lawmakers wrote. “This information was created and provided in the context of an employment relationship and may contain highly sensitive information about individual workers. Consumers have more privacy protections than workers, yet Spirit has collected far more private information about its employees than about its customers.” “While we understand that Google has stated that it will not receive personally identifiable information and that the data will undergo third-party scrubbing before its transfer, we are concerned that conventional de-identification safeguards may not be sufficient to protect employee privacy in the context of modern artificial intelligence,” they continued. “Removing names, email addresses, or other direct identifiers does not necessarily make a dataset anonymous. As we have seen time and time again, artificial intelligence systems have been able to identify patterns across large datasets, connect seemingly unrelated pieces of information, and potentially infer or reconstruct information about individuals or identifiable groups.” “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,” they concluded. “The unprecedented scale and sophistication of modern artificial intelligence make it particularly important that privacy protections keep pace with the technology. We therefore urge Google and Spirit to address these concerns and establish meaningful, enforceable safeguards before the proposed transaction proceeds.” The full text of the letter can be found here . Senator Cortez Masto has stood up for Spirit Airline’s displaced workers and has been a champion for consumer privacy. At the start of Spirit’s bankruptcy proceedings, she demanded that employees receive their earned wages and accrued benefits. The Senator has also worked to ensure AI innovation includes strong guardrails to protect American’s privacy and national security. Last year, her legislation to prohibit American investment in Chinese AI companies was passed into law. When President Xi Jinping visited the United States, Cortez Masto urged President Trump to negotiate a formal agreement with President Xi for the development, testing, and use of AI models. Cortez Masto is also leading legislation to crack down on robocalls and robotexts, which are more common and dangerous with the use of AI. ###