A woman dressed in green holds a up a poster of a newspaper front page that says "Democracy is not a joke, Gyanesh". She is seen shouting, while at least three police officers appear to be pulling her away from behind as she steadies herself with one hand against the back of a truck.

A protester in Mumbai, India is detained by police during a protest demanding the resignation of the country's chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar on Oct. 10, 2026. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)

India’s SIR Voter Purge Shows Digital Authoritarianism in Action

Mothballed Spirit Airlines passenger planes sit parked at Goodyear Airport, Thursday, May 28, 2026, in Goodyear, Ariz. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin)

Spirit Airlines Is Selling Its Workers’ Data. That Can’t Fly.

President Donald Trump speaks in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Tuesday Sept. 29, 2026, during a lunch meeting with top executives of AI firms, as NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, left, and Elon Musk listen. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

AI Governance Is Being Decided Now, and the Public Isn’t in the Room

In this photo provided by Ukraine's 65th Mechanized Brigade press service, A Ukrainian serviceman launches a drone towards Russian positions at the front line in the Zaporizhzhia region, Ukraine, Wednesday Oct. 7, 2026. (Andriy Andriyenko/Ukraine's 65th Mechanized Brigade via AP)

Coding Kids, Drone Wars and Algorithmic Realism

Teachers attend an artificial intelligence professional development and certification program hosted by learning company Pearson on August 7, 2026, in Miami. Nearly 200 teachers from Miami-Dade County Public Schools participated and are now working toward a verified AI credential as they begin the new school year. The program is part of Pearson's commitment to expand AI learning opportunities for teachers nationwide through the White House's "Pledge to America's Youth: Investing in AI Education." (Jesus Aranguren/AP Content Services for Pearson)

Natasha Singer Details Tech’s Grip on Public Schools

Ukrainian servicemen of the Pathfinder Unmanned Systems Battalion of the 115th Separate Mechanized Brigade attend a training with Vampire UAVs, practicing munition drops at an undisclosed location in Kharkiv region, Ukraine, Thursday, Oct. 8, 2026. (AP Photo/Andrii Marienko)

Steve Feldstein on Bytes, Bullets, Blood and Borders

In this Jan. 16, 2017, file photo, the abandoned childhood home of singer Aretha Franklin sits behind a security fence in Memphis, Tenn. The Franklin birthplace and the surrounding neighborhoods moved to the forefront of a large cleanup effort, as the city refused to accept decay as a fact of life in the urban landscape. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, File)

A Data Science Playbook for Social Justice

Who Participates in Politics on Social Media, and Why?

Europe Wants to Regulate AI Friends. But How Do You Curb Dependency?

Taoiseach Micheal Martin and European Commission President Ursula von der speaking during a press conference in the Main Quadrangle at University College Cork, as Ireland begins its presidency of the EU Council. Photo: Liam McBurney/PA Wire IRISH (Press Association via AP Images)

At Ireland’s AI Summit, Tech Industry Dominates as Civil Society Sits Out

A vintage court room with many chairs, benches, and a neon lit ceiling, and black and white portraits on wood panelled walls. 

A courtroom of the US District Court for the Northern District of Illinois. 

Nippon Life v. OpenAI and the Future of AI Legal Work

A grafiti drawing of a white skeleton on an asphalt street with a sewer grid placed direclty where the ribs would be.

 is shared by diegoluis on Flickr (CC-BY)

Tech Hype is Cannibalizing the Future

The street front of a mobile money agent with an Airtel umbrella and sign in the foreground. One person is sitting to the left, reading, another person can be seen from behind inside the store. 

 in Gulu, northern Uganda in 2016 shared by Fiona Graham/WorldRemit on Flickr (CC BY-SA)

In Africa, Digital Payments Could Unlock Tax Revenue if Data is Protected

A pile of narrowly shredded white newspaper with black writing that is not legible.

Cutting Local Journalists, McClatchy Embraces AI Content

Disinformation Conference in Europe Caught Up in Transatlantic Politics

President Donald Trump gestures to Elon Musk as he speaks to reporters at the White House in Washington, Tuesday Sept. 29, 2026, after meeting with top executives of AI firms. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

It's Time to Regulate the AI Development Process

Britain's Prime Minister Andy Burnham gestures as he speaks next to Varun Chandra, his Chief Business, Investment and Trade Adviser during a business and investor roundtable before attending the 81st United Nations General Assembly in New York City, Tuesday Sept. 22, 2026. (Toby Melville/Pool Photo via AP)

UK Wants to Lead the World on AI Safety. It Can’t Decide Where To Start

Library shelves with books facing each other, with light against a wall in the distance. It says "NONFICTION" on each shelf. 

 shared by Orin Zebest on Flickr in 2007 (CC-BY)

Can AI Help Fix Peer Review Instead of Breaking It?

A white banner with dozens of names and ages written in black is held by a group of teenagers in front of a building, seen between the dark red leaves of a tree. 

A banner lists the names of young people advocates say died because of social media outside the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building and U.S. Courthouse on Aug. 18. A settlement in a multistate lawsuit accusing Meta of harming children was reached there on Aug. 26. (APPhoto/NoahBerger)

No, the Meta Settlement Isn’t a First Amendment Problem

Professsor Yoshua Bengio, co-chair of the UN International Independent Panel on AI attends Security Council meeting on Artificial intelligence and international security at UN Headquarters in New York, NY on September 23, 2026. (Photo by Lev Radin/Sipa via AP Images)

The UN's AI Panel Sees Misalignment. We See Corporate (Mis)Behavior.

Apar Gupta is a fellow at Tech Policy Press.

 on India that ruminates on its democratic backsliding but inevitably 

. It goes something like this: Yes, the press has been cowed and bought while the courts are subverted. Yes, Hindu nationalism has led to violence against minorities and the growth of authoritarianism. Activists and opposition parties are protesting on the streets, but can we call it an authoritarian country if Prime Minister Narendra Modi keeps winning election after election? After all, he won in 2014, returned with a bigger mandate in 2019, and secured a third consecutive term in 2024, even if with 

. Add to this the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)'s victories in state after state in between, and who are we, as distant observers, to lecture India on human rights?

This acceptance rests on the premise that the register of voters is honest, as certified by an Election Commission that has, for seven decades since independence, largely been regarded as a non-partisan institution. In a country of nearly a billion electors, where ballots follow caste, religion and language, the roll and who gets to be on it goes a long way in determining the outcome. This premise is now being challenged, and not only by India's opposition parties, whose calls for electoral reform and transparency in the past have been improperly rejected as the cries of 

. But also through more than a year of dogged journalism that has questioned the propriety of the Election Commission’s Special Intensive Revision, or the SIR.

Since June 2025, the SIR — which aims to re-verify almost the entire electorate through a centralized database — has left 

 in the latest phase alone, which covers 16 states and three union territories. The process has often been conducted on the eve of a state election. In West Bengal 

, or 12 percent of the electorate, came off the rolls shortly before the April election that 

gave the BJP control of the state for the first time

. The Supreme Court blessed the exercise on May 27 when it decided the case of 

Association for Democratic Reforms v. Election Commission of India

 reported that two of the Election Commission's three members had 

 at least 14 times in 10 months to how the exercise and its database were being run. These were objections from inside the commission, made by members whom the present government had itself appointed.

 the risks of digital centralization for Tech Policy Press. I ask two further questions. First, how did the clerical exercise of maintaining a list become a software system that nobody outside the Election Commission can inspect? Second, and more important, what happens when such a system is run by a referee picked by the government of the day?

The voter roll has never been clean or neutral

From its first general election, India made the registration of voters 

the job of the State and not of the citizen

, with a view towards its claim of being a democracy that gained independence from colonial rule. But the logistics behind high political principles have been mundane and consist of bureaucratic form-filling based on door-to-door visits. This includes a revision to add newly eligible voters and to remove those who have shifted from the locality or have since died. These processes have always been creaky and inefficient, relying on an imperfect state capacity which has allowed political parties to game them to a limited extent, especially as a strategy for increasing their chances of victory by relying on identity markers of religion, caste and sect for inclusion or exclusion from the electoral rolls. For instance, 

 by Abusaleh Shariff and Khalid Saifullah found that Muslims were missing at markedly higher rates than others, and that the "cleaning" of rolls has a history of being directed at them.

As Ujjwal Kumar Singh and Anupama Roy recount in the book 

Election Commission of India: Institutionalising Democratic Uncertainties

, in 1992 the Election Commission under T.N. Seshan told its officers that the burden of proving citizenship lay on the voter. An officer in Delhi then declared a slum colony of 18,000 residents to be suspected foreigners, and more than 16,000 of them lost their vote. The Supreme Court stopped the exercise in its 1995 ruling in 

Lal Babu Hussein v. Electoral Registration Officer

, holding that where a name is already on the roll the officer who entered it is presumed to "have gone through the procedural requirements under the statute". The last 

, conducted from 2002-2004, was built on this rule of inclusion. This time when the SIR began, the Commission 

 its own order for that revision and how it was conducted. An official told 

, "There was no digitalization in those times." The guidelines, which were produced by petitioners who had approached the Supreme Court in the latest round of challenges against the SIR, show that it was the enumerator who filled in the record, that no form had to be returned by a deadline, and that, in their own words, "it is not the job of the enumerator to determine citizenship of an individual." Bloated rolls and missing voters, the two issues that the SIR claims to solve, are old problems, and the last intensive revision sought to cure them by sending enumerators to do the work while presuming that those already on the roll belonged there.

Technology as the Election Commission's silver bullet

Since the 1990s, successive Election Commissions have answered every challenge with technology, or more particularly digitization, to overcome low state capacity and the problem of administrative corruption and abuse of power. For instance, a former Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), S.Y. Quraishi, records in the book 

 that face recognition software deployed in Manipur caught a woman who had come to vote more than 60 times in different guises. In 2015, the then-CEC H.S. Brahma 

, India's national biometric ID, with the promise that nearly every complaint about the rolls would disappear. As 

 later reported, about 320 million records 

 that this software may have contributed to the removal of 2.2 million voters from Telangana's rolls, and that officers were deferring to algorithms they did not understand.

The intellectual case for such a system came from technologists who have been feted with disproportionate influence in public policy making in India. Its clearest expression is found in the 2015 book 

 where Nandan Nilekani, who built Aadhaar, and his co-author Viral Shah cited an estimate that 85 million entries on the rolls were duplicates or fakes and proposed a cure in four parts. They propose a single, centralized voter management system running the same software across the country, enrolment at banks, post offices and petrol pumps on the model of Aadhaar, the linking of voter IDs with Aadhaar so that biometrics would weed out duplicates, and smartphone services that would one day let a citizen vote from anywhere. "If it can work for your credit card," they wrote, "it should work for your vote." The transactional view of democratic rights is a theme that runs through the book.

What is less remembered from this book, and perhaps not voiced openly even by Nilekani, is that voter lists were to be published in a machine-readable form, with every change visible, so that parties and citizens could audit the database for themselves. India went on to build the centralized system and left out the machine readable rolls that were meant to make it auditable. Such lack of transparency is evident throughout the conduct of the Election Commission. This is further evidenced by how ERONET, the Commission's registration backend, has since 2023 been operated by Tata Consultancy Services, a fact that the Commission never disclosed and that 

 from the company's shareholder filings. Meanwhile, the Commission itself treats machine-readable rolls 

. With the mindless and opaque deployment of technology, some former Chief Election Commissioners have taken note, with Quraishi 

 last year that democracy "collapses also by a thousand tiny exclusions". Nilekani has himself since received a SIR notice to 

Money, muscle and a partisan Election Commission

This centralized voter database is in the hands of the Election Commission, which works within an electoral system already tilted towards the ruling party in three ways. The first is money, for there are no real campaign finance limits in India. This was even institutionalized through a system of anonymous "electoral bonds" that financed political parties from 2018 until the Supreme Court struck the scheme down in 

Association for Democratic Reforms v. Union of India

 in February 2024. However, by that time one national election and more than two dozen state elections had been fought on the proceeds, and the BJP had 

The second is muscle, which is today exercised through federal investigative agencies. The Enforcement Directorate 

 against politicians over 10 years and secured two convictions, and 

 of the politicians it has pursued since 2014 belong to the opposition. These investigations not only handicap state elections, but also systematically benefit the BJP by 

splitting and diminishing the power of other political parties

, because legislators facing criminal charges often defect from their parties, giving the BJP an advantage when forming governments.

The third is the capture of the referee itself, as per the following sequence of events. In 

 (2023) the Supreme Court directed that Election Commissioners be chosen by a panel of the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition and the Chief Justice of India. Rather than following this decision, within 10 months Parliament 

 the Chief Justice with a minister nominated by the Prime Minister, which gave the government two of the panel's three votes. It is under this law that Gyanesh Kumar, the present CEC, 

 in February 2025 over the dissent of the Leader of the Opposition. An environment of fear surrounds the expression of dissent. In 2019, Ashok Lavasa, who was next in line to head the Commission, dissented from its decisions clearing Modi and Amit Shah, then the BJP president, of violating the model code of conduct. He was 

 — later, members of his family faced tax investigations. He resigned the following year. His phone number was later 

 to be on a leaked list of potential targets of Pegasus spyware typically used by governments. Human Rights Watch has since 

 that at least 110 of the Prime Minister's 173 campaign speeches in 2024 denigrated Muslims, something that could be considered an electoral offence — at least worthy of an investigation — but to which the Commission responded with a mere 

 of concern to the BJP's president without naming Modi.

When the referee is not trusted, neither is any machine that it alone can inspect. Here, the opposition's suspicions 

first attached to the electronic voting machine

, which they accused of being intransparent and of manipulating the count, for good reason. A 2017 comparative study by Scott Shackelford, Bruce Schneier and their co-authors, “

,” concluded that no voting machine is impervious to manipulation and that trust has to come from evidence independent of the software, such as paper trails, audits and public scrutiny. Impervious to reason, the Supreme Court has taken the opposite view where in 

Sunil Ahya v. Election Commission of India

 (2023) it declined to direct an independent audit of the source code of the machines against a published standard, reasoning in its order that the manner of such an audit is a "sensitive" issue best left to the Commission. In effect, the Court accepted that the code is safe because it is secret. It was after this that the opposition turned to something it could count. In February 2025, Rahul Gandhi of the Indian National Congress, leader of the opposition, 

 that Maharashtra's roll had grown by 3.9 million voters in five months, more than had been added in the previous five years. On June 7, 2025 he 

machine-readable rolls and for polling day security camera footage, to which the Commission replied through unnamed sources that the charge was “

Seventeen days later, the Commission ordered the SIR beginning with Bihar, where an election was less than five months away. The 

 were migration, urbanization, unreported deaths and the presence of "foreign illegal immigrants". Each of Bihar's 78.9 million electors was required to return a form within a month, and 

 that those whose forms were not received "will not be included in the draft roll". Any person absent from the roll of 2003 was required to produce documents, even though Bihar's roll had been revised as recently as January 2025.

written submissions filed for Akhtarul Iman

, a legislator from Bihar's Amour constituency, put it to the Supreme Court, the urgency was "entirely of its own making," since the Commission had let five general elections pass without an intensive revision and now wanted one within 90 days. Amit Shah, by now the Union Home Minister, 

 that the aim was to "detect, delete and deport infiltrators." The CEC 

 as a response to the complaints of political parties about the rolls, though the opposition had asked for data and was instead given a drive for deletions. When Gandhi returned with evidence of 2.5 million suspect entries added to the rolls 

, he was asked to file an affidavit by the Election Commission. 

The SIR is a software process that begins with the hastily 

 paper rolls of 2002 to 2005, printed in several scripts. In West Bengal, they were machine-transliterated from Bengali into English before any matching was done. In late November 2025, the form of each elector was then keyed in by field officers on phone apps, at a rate of 

, and and then compared against the old records. Any elector whom the software could not link to their own or a parent's entry in the old roll was marked as "unmapped". There is no published standard for transcription accuracy.

When only about 3 percent of West Bengal's electors 

, the software was applied to those it had already matched in order to flag "logical discrepancies". The rules, pieced together from litigation, flag a parent's name that does not match the old roll; a parent who is less than 15 or more than 50 years older than their child; a grandparent less than 40 years older; a person with more than six children or with five or more siblings. Also, siblings born less than nine months apart, 

. The rules differ between states and were rewritten midway, as in West Bengal where the number of electors under suspicion 

fell from 13.1 million to about 9.5 million within weeks

. No version has been published with a specification, an error rate or an audit. A flag is also not a finding of ineligibility. It only generates a notice, after which the voter must produce documents.

This software flagged 13.1 million electors in West Bengal, or 17 percent of the roll, and 

23.5 million in Madhya Pradesh, or 41 percent

. In December 2025 the office of West Bengal's Chief Electoral Officer 

 that the software was malfunctioning because the data of 2002 "had not been digitized accurately". Such failures do not fall evenly, since exact matching on transliterated data penalizes names that have more than one spelling. "Xalxo," 

, an Adivasi community, was rendered as "Khalkho" and flagged, while Md and Mohammed, or Sk and Sheikh, (both commonly used abbreviations) were read as different persons. In Nandigram, 

 of those struck off were Muslims, though Muslims make up only a quarter of its electorate.

What this means at the doorstep, was recorded by 

 in Delhi's Chhatarpur in late September. A voter and his six siblings 

 because the software had linked all seven of them to one father, which it treated as suspicious. The notice cited "a likely incorrect match". Their father received a notice as well, since the 2002 roll records him as Kedar while his documents carry the name Kedar Singh, and his handwritten school certificate was not accepted. At Bela Estate, a settlement on the floodplain of the Yamuna, 

 a polling booth that went from 729 voters to one. When the Delhi exercise came up before the Supreme Court on Sept. 22, 

 of the 3.3 million notices issued in the city that, "In all probability, they are machine-generated notices."

Nor has the exercise achieved what it promised, as the Commission's own de-duplication software 

, and it later told the Supreme Court that the tool had been discarded because "the strength and accuracy of the results were variable". Since the final roll is published in a format that machines cannot read, the Association for Democratic Reforms, the lead petitioner in the Bihar SIR case, stated in its written submissions that it "burnt the midnight oil" with data scientists to convert it. It found more than half a million apparent duplicates, as well as 779 electors who had apparently filed objections against the flagging of their names on the ground that they were not citizens of India.

The CEC has described this design as one that shifts the burden of proof "

". In practice the burden has moved the other way. Where the database fails to find a person, it is that person who receives the notice, who must stand in the queue and attend the hearing, and anyone left off the draft roll 

 as if they were a new voter. In Delhi, where a third of the electorate was left off the draft roll, 

that the app used by field officers had been updated with a "Mark VIP" feature. A notice issued to the Chief Minister was resolved within hours, while a daily-wage worker in the same constituency 

 over a notice written in English, a language he could not read.

The consequences now extend beyond the ballot, as BJP governments in West Bengal and Bihar 

 that those struck off cannot draw on welfare schemes, including food rations.

A Supreme Court that rules after the fact

was challenged before the Supreme Court in July 2025

, four months before Bihar went to the polls. The Court 

 if there was mass exclusion. It delivered its 

 on 27 May 2026, by which time Bihar, West Bengal, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Puducherry had all voted on the revised rolls. The judgment found the SIR to be proportionate and treated 

 as a precedent that belonged to a different context. The words "software" and "algorithm" 

the judgment. It was in West Bengal that the Court did intervene, by having judicial officers decide about 6 million doubtful cases and by 

. Yet on the very day these tribunals began work, it held in 

Mostari Banu v. Election Commission of India

 that the "mere pendency of appeals" would not entitle excluded persons to vote. Polling began 10 days later with 

The Court's capitulation to the present government has repeatedly taken the form of delay. The challenge to electoral bonds was 

 and decided in 2024, and the revocation of Jammu and Kashmir's autonomy 

. In each case the delay had done its work before the Court ruled. Similarly, the challenge to the 2023 law on the selection of Election Commissioners, 

, itself remains undecided. On Sept. 23 two judges delivered 

 on whether it should be heard by a larger bench, and every Commissioner presently in office has been appointed under that law. Nor has the Bench been untouched by the vocabulary of the government. The present Chief Justice Surya Kant, who authored the SIR judgment, 

 in December 2025 whether "intruders" should expect a "red carpet", and in May 2026 

 unemployed young people to "cockroaches". The youth movement that adopted this insult as its name, the Cockroach Janta Party, is now 

 demanding the resignation of the CEC. A voter who has been deleted and has read these remarks may lack trust in the Court as a neutral forum, whatever, in fact, influences any individual judge.

Dissent within the Commission and the loss of trust

The three-member Election Commission is itself divided, and the public learnt this from reports in the 

 which revealed that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, both of whom were appointed by the present government, 

 at least 14 times between October 2025 and August 2026. One of them warned of the "

" of the electoral roll database and sought an audit of who could alter it. Another recorded that the Commission's head of IT had no legal authority to restrict the access of Electoral Registration Officers, who are made responsible for the roll by statute. In Goa, officers 

, but the software could not record their decision and all 97 were left off the roll.

Even though the Commission maintains that 

 three days after the dissent became public it announced 

, including a review of its software, which Quraishi described in a discussion hosted by 

". The discretion that the law vests in local officers continues to revolve around the Commission’s digital infrastructure. In West Bengal, 

 by the Institute of South Asian Studies found that deletions exceeded the BJP's margin of victory in 105 of the seats it won, even as it concluded that the overall result would have remained the same. It cannot be shown, then, that the SIR by itself decided any election. However, what is clear is that the SIR has left more than 130 million names off draft rolls, through software that nobody outside the Commission can inspect — staffed and empowered by the government of the day that inevitably ends up winning elections.

Abigail Kunkler and Mayu Tobin-Miyaji are counsels at EPIC.

 Spirit Airlines is attempting to sell its data, which includes troves of employee data, to Google for $10 million in its bankruptcy proceedings. Google is proposing to purchase this data to train its artificial intelligence systems. While the 

 claims that Google is not seeking personal data, the agreement only references consumer data and privacy, with no mention of protecting the privacy of the airline’s employees. This omission displays the parties’ carelessness towards workers’ privacy and threatens to set a dangerous precedent. Shortly after the sale was announced, the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO (AFA-CWA) 

, raising concerns for their members’ privacy.

In light of the privacy issues at stake, EPIC and Professor Seema N. Patel, represented by the Harvard Cyberlaw Clinic, recently submitted 

 to the US bankruptcy court for the Southern District of New York supporting the AFA-CWA's position, laying out the privacy harms and warning the court of the consequences this sale would have for workers. This is an important case for those interested in privacy and worker power to understand the bankruptcy sale at issue, its broader implications, and what must change to protect worker interests moving forward in light of generative AI companies’ insatiable appetite for training data.

Google and Spirit’s data sale agreement is insufficient to protect employee privacy

Former Spirit Airlines employees are justifiably 

 about this sale. The sale agreement’s list of data assets enumerates troves of Spirit employee data. They include employee data going back to 1986; time card information; payroll records; employee tax forms; emails; and Microsoft Teams messages. The disclosure of this dataset presents a serious privacy risk for anyone who has ever worked for Spirit. The employment records contain sensitive information, such as tax and financial information, addresses, contents of internal communications on Teams, and disciplinary and performance records. The disclosure of tax and other financial information can create 

. Further, the data may reveal sensitive insights about individual workers—messages may show workers organizing for better pay and working conditions against management; discussions of health conditions or disabilities; or conversations about religion or family life. These types of information can reveal sensitive information that the employee never expected to leave the context in which they were disclosed, risk the employee’s future job prospects, and take away employees’ peace of mind.

While the original sale agreement does not clearly provide for any privacy protections for employee data, 

 indicates that Spirit has agreed to wholly exclude the most sensitive sets of data, including medical and disability data and drug and alcohol testing records, conceding the privacy interest at stake. There are also ongoing discussions to require the parties to deidentify the rest of employee data, according to the filing. The wholesale exclusion of sensitive data from the sale would be a positive step if the agreement is finalized. However, the deidentification for the rest of the data is not a magic bullet. Depending on how the data is processed, “deidentified” data, analyzed together with other data that relates to the same person, such as data included in emails or other documents, could still lead to reidentification. Further, with increasingly advanced AI systems and a trove of employee data combined with any already publicly available data, individual employees’ 

, leaving employees still vulnerable to privacy risks.

The risk of reidentification presents its own privacy harms. Reidentification by Google or future recipients of data would be a completely unexpected use of their data and robs the affected employees of control over their data. Employees could not have imagined, much less expected, that the data collected for the purpose of performing their job duties would be used to train AI models when they accepted their job offers. Spirit’s sale of employee data that risks reidentification betrays the trust employees put in Spirit when their data was collected to perform their job duties.

The employees also lack the ability to hold Google or Spirit accountable. The sale agreement indicates that Google is solely responsible for nominating the third party to deidentify the data, with no formal role for employees to play in ensuring proper deidentification. Even if Google promises that it and any future recipients of data will not intentionally reidentify employees from the data, as it does in regard to consumer data, as a matter of contract law, the AFA nor the affected employees can enforce that promise. Google would essentially be asking the employees to rely on its pinky promise.

Because of these layered privacy risks, the bankruptcy court must proceed with extreme caution. If this sale is allowed to proceed over the objection of the AFA-CWA and other unions, it would cement the perverse incentives for employers to collect as much data about employees as possible for potential monetization in bankruptcy. This would be an unsettling and dangerous precedent for all workers in the US that would undermine their dignity and power.

The legal landscape that leaves workers unprotected

While Spirit’s attempt to sell its employees’ data is shocking, it was not unpredictable. Decades of widening power imbalances and diminishing legal protections led to this sale. The stakes are high for workers seeking to exercise their rights or bargain with their employer, often prohibitively so; most US workers are at-will, meaning they could be let go for any reason, or for no reason at all. While employers are granted broad control to organize their workplace and workforce as they see fit—

including by mandating invasive technology

 that continuously extracts data from or generates data about workers—workers are left with little ability to challenge new technologies, data collections, or data uses in the workplace. This is particularly true for the 

The law has not stepped up to protect worker privacy. Many privacy laws in the US treat data as a property asset, and 

 from data protections. The Bankruptcy Code similarly limits its privacy inquiries to consumers. When workers try to vindicate their limited privacy rights in court, courts rarely grant relief. Taken together, the law views a worker’s information—whether it is collected from, generated by, or inferred about them—as an employer-controlled asset that cannot be infringed upon.

If the court takes seriously the risks to workers’ privacy and livelihoods posed by the sale, it will not allow it to go forward. The Federal Trade Commission and state Attorneys General should intervene to protect the privacy rights of Spirit workers, as 

. Regardless of the court’s decision, however, US policymakers and worker advocates have significant work ahead to dismantle both the incentives to collect and sell worker data and the framework that makes it possible. Adequately addressing the threat Spirit workers now face requires establishing a legal framework that provides meaningful protections for worker privacy and moves away from treating data as the employer’s property to be bought and sold and the workplace as an employer-dominated fiefdom that should be left to regulate itself.

Labor unions should take the sale as a sign to bargain proactively for privacy protections. Spirit’s bankruptcy makes clear what privacy advocates 

—corporations consider all data, not just consumer data, property to be sold to the highest bidder. The AFA-CWA was the 

 to the sale of employee information and other data that implicates worker privacy. It is a testament to the 

Latest

Podcast

Recent

Our content delivered to your inbox

Thank you!

Around the globe