Google buys a bankrupt company's data...

Spirit Airlines grounded its planes and handed over the keys on May 2, at 2:30 in the morning. Thirty-four years as an airline, seventeen thousand people out of work overnight—that's no small thing, and since then, lawyers have been selling off the pieces. The planes, the simulators, the service carts, the coffee machines. The usual business of liquidation.

Except that on Monday, there was something unusual. Google was interested in the employees' emails. One hundred million emails. Five hundred million Teams messages. Google paid ten million dollars for the whole lot. Why buy emails for 10 million dollars? 

And they weren't the only ones: there were two other buyers in the room.

Lot number 12: years of internal email.

What exactly is in the box

The inventory is enough to make your head spin, and it's public because a bankruptcy sale goes before a judge. One hundred million internal emails. Five hundred million Teams messages—that is, Microsoft's corporate messaging service, the thing where people write “is this okay for you?” fifteen times a day and paste screenshots. Seventeen million OneDrive files. More than twenty million SharePoint items. And five hundred sixteen code repositories, amounting to around thirty million lines of software written in-house.

Good luck reading all that!

Along with it come pricing models, booking curves, crew schedules, fuel orders, financial databases, and customer service procedures. In other words: not just what people were saying to each other, but everything they were working on while saying it.

Do the math; it's instructive. Ten million dollars for six hundred million messages puts each message at about one and a half cents. The lot also contains code and databases, so take that as an order of magnitude, not a per-pound rate. But the order of magnitude is enough: your Friday evening email saying “okay, have a good weekend” is worth exactly the same as the three-page one explaining why the project was headed straight for the wall. The market doesn't do nuance.

What is NOT included in the sale, and this is important: passenger data, the loyalty program, bank cards, and anything that identifies a person. An outside provider must clean the archive before Google can access it, at Google's expense, with Google contractually agreeing not to try to piece the names back together.

Why an email archive is worth ten million dollars

Here, you have to understand what Google is really buying, because it isn't what you think.

It isn't buying information. Nobody cares about the price of kerosene in 2019. It's buying behavior. The way ordinary people, in an ordinary company, make a decision, coordinate, make mistakes, fix them, follow up three times with the colleague who isn't answering, and eventually work around the official procedure because it doesn't work.

And that is something no documentation contains. Documentation explains how the system is supposed to work. A thread of forty Teams messages explains how it really works, with the colleague replying, “oh yeah, that's been broken since March; click twice and it goes through.” Guess which one teaches a machine how the business works.

This is exactly the fuel missing from the models I was talking about last week, the ones no longer trying to answer faster but to work longer, on tasks lasting several hours. To handle a long task, you need to have seen what a workday looks like when it goes off the rails. Not a workday from a manual.

On the left, what the procedure says. On the right, what really happened.

Google actually says it plainly, in a communicator's phrase so flat that it becomes honest: this data set “may help improve our products and AI models.” There you have it. No grand speech.

And what about your emails?

Well. I don't know if you realize this. You have never worked for Spirit Airlines, and you are wondering what this has to do with you. Three things, and the first may surprise you.

One. Your work emails do not belong to you. And let's be frank, your personal emails are not much more yours if you use Gmail, Hotmail, or others: they sleep on someone else's servers. At the office, it's worse: your emails belong to your employer, to the company, just like the chair you sit on. This is nothing new; it's employment law in pretty much every country in Europe. What's new is that this chair now has resale value. If your company disappears, everything you did there goes with the rest of the furniture, and there are now people raising their hands in the auction room to buy the traces you left behind. 

Two. This already existed, but not for you. When a company is liquidated, its customer database has always been sold; it is often the only asset left. The new development is not the sale of data. It's that it is no longer CUSTOMER data that is worth the most; it's EMPLOYEE conversations. No one had anticipated that the residual value of an airline would lie in its written hallway conversations.

Everything in an office has a resale price. Since Monday, so does your mailbox.

Three, and this is the good part. Because there is one: the AI assistants sold to you as capable of handling your office work are currently trained on clean texts, anything but real LIFE: documentation, manuals, forums. A model that has read six hundred million real messages from a real inbox may finally understand that an urgent request should not be accepted at 6 p.m. on a Friday, and that it would be better to postpone it until Monday. 

In any case, Google, like its competitors, is a real vacuum cleaner for anything and everything, as long as it feeds their AI. Let's just hope AI does not become even dumber as a result. If the company's employees did nothing but play cards all day, we may end up with a superb civil-service AI!

What bothers me, and what doesn't

What doesn't bother me: the principle. A dead company, company data, a buyer, a judge, a contract prohibiting reidentification, and a provider paid to remove the names. It is regulated, it is public, and it is infinitely cleaner than the hundred ways our data circulates every day without anyone signing anything.

What bothers me is the word “anonymized,” because that word mostly sounds like a shortcut.

Removing names, addresses and phone numbers from twenty years of email is technically doable. Removing the context is not. All it takes is a “I’m leaving early on Thursday, I’m picking up the kids from school” or “What are we having for dinner tonight, darling?” in the middle of a thread for the name to become more or less useless: there’s only one person in the department who leaves early on Thursdays, and everyone knows who it is. Multiply that by six hundred million messages written by people who thought they were talking among themselves. I’m not saying it’s going to go badly. I’m saying that “anonymized” describes an intention, not a guaranteed result, and that no one will be able to verify it from the outside.

And then there’s the detail that sticks in your throat. Those seventeen thousand people lost their jobs on May 2. They weren’t consulted, they have no say in this sale, and they obviously won’t receive a cent of the ten million. Their words, meanwhile, will continue to work. It’s legal, it’s logical, it’s even provided for under bankruptcy law. It’s still a little sad.

In short. If you were planning to write to a colleague today, go ahead. Just remember not to write anything stupid—we never know who’ll be rereading it fifteen years from now.

I have one last question: how long will it be before we see Google send a representative, after someone’s death, to offer the family the chance to vacuum up all of that person’s data—the emails, letters and every trace they left from birth to death—for a few peanuts... just to feed its increasingly hungry AI?