Last Friday, Google won an auction to acquire a huge amount of Spirit Airlines data.
The data doesn’t include personal information or customer data, but instead nearly covers the airline's entire employment and workplace record.
To ensure that no individual can be identified in the dataset, Google agreed to use a court-appointed ombudsman to oversee a process to strip any personally identifying information (PII) from the data before it’s transferred to Google. Under the deal, Google agreed to maintain the data in this de-identified form and to never intentionally re-identify the data. And if Google sells access to the data, third parties would supposedly be bound by the same terms.