Vol.066 — Google Bought a Dead Airline’s Inbox for $10 Million. So What Are You Worth?
Date: 2026-08-18 | Newsletter
Key Summary
Vol.066 steps away from the AI-adoption diary to ask what a person’s data is actually worth. This month a New York bankruptcy court auctioned off what was left of Spirit Airlines — not the planes, the paperwork: 100 million emails, 500 million Microsoft Teams items, 30 million recorded customer service calls, 763,000 flight records, roughly 715 million items in all. Google won it for USD 10 million, about 1.4 US cents an item, and said plainly it wants the material to train AI. It had to outbid Mercor at USD 7.5 million — a company whose entire business is supplying training data to AI labs. Two serious buyers in a contested auction for a failed airline’s filing cabinet: the market exists, and it has depth. Zenta then builds a price ladder for a single human being. A US bankruptcy judge and a legally registered Japanese 名簿屋 independently land on about ten cents a head, with nobody coordinating. The price tracks what the buyer intends: fractions of a cent to count you, ten to fifty cents to reach you, tens of dollars to be you, and about USD 67 a year to keep extracting from you. You are also worth more dead than alive — 300 yen for a deceased person’s record, and Spirit’s archive only became sellable because the company died. None of that money moves toward you. The machinery, he shows, is twenty-six years old: after the Toysmart bankruptcy of 2000, companies did not stop selling data, they wrote the bankruptcy sale into the privacy policy up front — the same clause that later let 23andMe’s genomes go to Regeneron for USD 256 million, about USD 17 a person. Spirit is the same pipe carrying corporate email instead of DNA, with a Google-paid deidentification agent bolted on and the flight attendants’ union objecting over 176,000 employee records. Meanwhile Japan’s 2026 APPI amendment opens the front door: a statistics-and-AI-development exception waiving individual consent for AI training. For owners the point is blunt — your customer list is already in this market whether or not you intend to sell it, the clause is almost certainly already in your own policy, and the risk peaks at the moment you are no longer around to defend it. Do it simple. Open your privacy policy, find the bankruptcy clause, and decide now what you would want done with your customers’ data on the day you are not there to be asked.