If you care about privacy, don’t feed your own personal information into a chatbot, which—among other concerns—could use it to train AI tools. Employees, though, mostly don’t have a choice.
A new, multibillion-dollar industry is dedicated to selling and buying work files and emails to companies seeking fresh sources of data to improve their AI models, and it’s only getting bigger. Data privacy laws tend to focus on consumer protections and rarely consider the rights of workers who create that information. What happens when your doctor’s notes, employee contracts, and Slack gossip are fed into the machine?
An agreement reached this week between Google and a union representing an unlikely workforce—flight attendants—could reveal a more permanent answer by creating a process that might reliably separate the data that workers produce from their own personal information. A judge still needs to approve the agreement next week.
The first-of-its-kind deal is part of the liquidation process for Spirit Airlines, which suddenly ceased operations earlier this year. In August, representatives for the budget airline said in a legal brief that it would be selling decades’ worth of data to Google for $10 million; Google said it would not receive personal information as part of the sale. But the union, the 55,000-member Association for Flight Attendants, argued that Google’s proposed safeguards would not prevent serious privacy violations for Spirit Airlines flight attendants, whose records—including 1.99 billion emails, 664 million Microsoft Teams messages, and employee travel and training information, all dating back to 1986—would be included in the sale.
The revised deal requires Spirit to hire a third-party data de-identification company, called Tonic AI, to exclude information that could potentially be associated with individual consumers or employees. Tonic will also be charged with ensuring that data, once de-identified, cannot be relinked to specific people. Google has promised to maintain the data in this new, de-identified form.
Many sensitive records will be excluded from the sale, including employee medical records, documents related to employee investigations and labor relations, and information about industry-wide safety management systems. In early November, a trade organization representing airlines chimed in on the sale, arguing that including that information could make employees less willing to come forward to report safety issues through voluntary programs, which are widely regarded as critical to the US aviation industry’s strong safety record.
The proposed agreement also includes an opt-out clause. Google can choose to renege on the sale if the data-cleaning process reduces the assets by more than 8 percent. Google didn’t respond to a request for comment.