When a company files for bankruptcy, its assets go up for sale. Usually that means planes, gates and office furniture. In Spirit Airlines’ case, it also meant internal business data, and Google won the auction with a $10 million bid. According to lawmakers, the proposed sale includes roughly 100 million emails and 500 million workplace messages, covering everything from spreadsheets to calendars to employee communications.
The Association of Flight Attendants-CWA and more than 100 members of Congress are asking for stronger protections before anything is transferred. Their central worry is that de-identified data, information with names removed, can sometimes be re-identified using modern analytics. They want payroll records, timecards and certain employee messages excluded from the sale entirely. Google says it is not buying personal information and that an independent third party will exclude or de-identify data before delivery.
For workers across the Suncoast and really everywhere, the case raises a question that goes well beyond aviation. What happens to the record of your work life when the company you built it at shuts down? And how much say should you have? We’d like to hear from you. If your employer’s internal messages were ever put up for auction, what would you want the rules to be?
