Additionally, Google has made binding commitments in court to never intentionally re-identify the data.
However, as the flight attendants’ association pointed out, the data sale seems to require that both consumers and workers put a lot of trust in Google.
Meanwhile skeptics, which to some extent includes the AFA, know that Google has been accused of shady data practices linked to privacy violations in the past. In 2024, Google settled a class action lawsuit raised by Incognito users and agreed to delete billions of data records reflecting users’ private browsing activities that it surreptitiously collected. Then last year, Google agreed to pay Texas $1.4 billion to settle a lawsuit claiming Google unlawfully tracked and collected users’ private data regarding geolocation, incognito searches, and biometric data. In a press release, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton bragged it was “the highest recovery nationwide against Google for any attorney general’s enforcement of state privacy laws.”
Consumers will also have to trust that Google’s third party does a thorough job sanitizing the data. Flight attendants are concerned that Google’s process seems to rely on removing identifiers from structured fields, like names associated with email addresses or chat sessions. That seems like a “poor instrument” to try to strip confidential info, even if the court agrees to order the conditions they have requested to drop their objection to the sale.
Left as is, Google’s deal omits consumer data while seemingly retaining records that any worker would consider confidential, the AFA argued.
“Nearly every consumer-facing category, including Customer Profiles, loyalty and Free Spirit data, active email addresses, chat sessions, call recordings, telephone numbers, website analytics, DOT complaints, is designated ‘Not Included,’” the AFA wrote in their objection. “Nearly every category under the heading ‘Team Member,’ time card information, employee data and employee records, employee business travel records, corporate and crew training records, payroll records, employee tax forms, and employee documents, is designated ‘Included.’”