Inside the bankruptcy sale of Spirit Airlines' internal records

This is a copy of Spirit's internal records; aircraft and routes are not included. According to the filings, the set includes about 100M emails (80,000 accounts), roughly 38M OneDrive and SharePoint files, some 500M Microsoft Teams items and 175,658 personnel records.

Google's bid leaves out passenger records. The court named a consumer privacy ombudsman, an independent official charged with protecting personal data in bankruptcy sales, and Google subsequently dropped further datasets while keeping its price unchanged.

Staff who wrote those messages never imagined they would train AI. The flight attendants' union wanted its members' data kept out, and pilots argued that any risk of being identified could deter confidential safety reports.

Springshot, a software supplier, claimed its contract made it the owner of data its product generated. Separately, a group of 121 members of Congress wrote to the heads of Spirit and Google to set out their concerns; Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Steven Horsford organised the letter.

Your business is not an airline, yet the same issues arise at any size:

• Who owns each set of records, including data held by your software suppliers?
• Who does the scrubbing, and who verifies it?
• How will staff react, and what will you tell them?
• Which datasets are included, and which stay out?

The Spirit case shows that questions about cleaning are central to the deal, not fussiness.