Selling data
Can my employer sell my data? What employees should know
Some employers are licensing staff's old work emails and Slack messages to AI companies, mostly when a company closes or goes bankrupt. Whether your employer may do this is a legal question we do not answer. What we can say: buyers usually strip names first, the money rarely reaches staff, and unions have objected in court.1,2,3,4,5
What is actually happening
In April 2026 a Futurism headline, citing Forbes, put it bluntly: your former employer is selling your Slacks and emails to train AI. MIT Technology Review later reported AI labs buying data from startups that had shut down. Searches like "can my employer sell my data" now show up in Google's suggestions.1,2,6
The biggest case is Spirit Airlines. Its bankruptcy sale covers about 100M emails, 500M Teams items and 175,658 employee records going back to 1986. Google won the auction, and the court has not yet ruled.7,8,9
Operating companies are doing it too, not just closed ones. micro1, for example, says it licenses internal communications from businesses with 30 or more staff.10,11
What is usually included, and what is taken out
Work messages are the main thing: email, chat and documents. Buyers say they remove or swap names and personal details before the data is used. Nyne's ads say names are swapped for codes. Polyshares uses an outside firm to scrub data first.12,13,3
HR and health records are often left out. SimpleClosure never sells sensitive employee and health records. In the Spirit case, Google agreed to drop timecard data, and micro1's rival offer proposed destroying raw employment records after processing.14,15,16
Removing names is not a perfect shield. A study found 99.98% of Americans could be re-identified from 15 traits, and researchers have pulled exact passages, including names and email addresses, out of AI models' training data.17,18
Who gets the money
Usually not the people who wrote the messages. For a closed startup, MIT Technology Review reports that the proceeds typically go to senior creditors and investors, not employees. In an operating company, the payment goes to the company.4,19
That is the part people find hardest. In online discussion of the Forbes story, most commenters were hostile: workers wrote the messages and see none of the money. Others replied that the company owns what staff produce at work. We do not take a side on ownership; that is a legal question.20
What employees have done about it
At Spirit, staff took it to court. The flight attendants' union asked to exclude their information. Other unions and the pilots objected too, and the pilots warned that people could stop using confidential safety reporting if they might be identified.5,21
Lawmakers joined in: 121 members of Congress wrote to Spirit's and Google's chief executives. A consumer privacy ombudsman was appointed to look after personal data in the sale.22,23
Pros and cons
Pros
What it means for a business like yours
If you own a business and are thinking about a data deal, your staff will ask the questions on this page. A law firm's checklist for sellers starts with bringing in HR and communications, not just the legal team. Telling people early, and explaining what is removed, costs little.24
Consider leaving out what staff care about most: HR files, health records and private messages. SimpleClosure already excludes sensitive employee and health records, and Nyne's ads say any folder can be left out.14,25
Should your business get in now?
Businesses are already licensing their records: micro1 has committed $1B over 12 months to buying company data, and at least 18 firms started advertising for it between September and mid-October 2026.26,27 Our view, not a promise: the money will not be around forever, because prices tend to come down as more businesses sell.26,28 Take the quiz to see which firms fit your business.
Plus a free Seller's Guide when you finish.
Plus a free Seller's Guide when you finish.FAQ
Questions, answered with sources
Every business is different, so this one is best talked through with the buyer you're working with. Their team goes over it with you before anything is signed.
Rarely. For closed startups, proceeds typically go to senior creditors and investors, not employees, MIT Technology Review reports.4
Every business is different, so this one is best talked through with the buyer you're working with. Their team goes over it with you before anything is signed.
Before you sign
Questions to talk through with your buyer
Every business is different, so these are best talked through with the buyer you're working with. Their team goes over them with you before anything is signed.
Questions for this kind of business
- How are employee data, union contracts and labor-law questions handled in this deal?
- How do CCPA, GDPR, UK GDPR and state privacy laws apply, and is de-identified data still personal information?
- How are employee data, union contracts and NLRA questions handled?
Questions for any buyer
- Is the license exclusive, and for how long?
- Can you sublicense the data, and to whom?
- Which AI labs will receive it, and will you tell us?
- How long do you keep it, and how is it deleted?
- What is your liability cap, and who indemnifies whom?
- Will the contract ban re-identification of people in the data?
- Who removes personal data, by what method, and do we approve it first?