What's this about?
Google won a bankruptcy auction for Spirit Airlines' business data — emails, chats and documents — for $10 million.
What exactly happens to data in a bankruptcy?
When a company is liquidated, its assets are sold to repay creditors, and data is an asset like any other. That includes internal communications, which were never created with an outside audience in mind. Bankruptcy courts can approve such sales with limited regard for the expectations of the people whose messages are in the archive, since the estate's obligation runs to creditors. It's an established mechanism now meeting a new kind of buyer, for whom a large corpus of real internal business communication has training value that has nothing to do with airlines.
Why is this worth noticing?
HN 49 points across two submissions
- It puts a price on a category most companies have never valued: years of internal corporate communication, sold for $10 million.
- Nobody who wrote those emails agreed to this, and no mechanism gave them a say — which makes bankruptcy an unexamined channel for training data acquisition.
- Read beside the Amazon book story the same day, it's the week's theme: the scramble for text that was never on the public internet.