Google moved closer on Monday to buying the data Spirit Airlines left behind when it shut down, after a court-appointed privacy official recommended that the bankruptcy court approve the $10 million sale.

The recommendation came from Lucy Thomson, the consumer privacy ombudsman in Spirit’s bankruptcy case. In a filing, Ms. Thomson said the companies had reworked the deal to cut the risks to passengers: they narrowed the scope of personal data included, dropped passenger databases from the sale entirely and hired an outside firm, Tonic.ai, to strip identifying details from records that could contain personal information, such as company emails.

“These changes will significantly reduce the potential risk of harm to the 97 million consumers who provided their personal data to Spirit for the purpose of booking airline travel,” the filing said, according to Business Insider, which first reported the recommendation. Any remaining risk of privacy losses, it said, had been “eliminated or mitigated.”

Spirit ceased operations in May. Google won an auction for the airline’s data with a $10 million bid and has said the material would help improve its products and AI models. The sale cannot close without the court’s approval.

The deal has opponents. Unions representing Spirit’s flight attendants and pilots filed objections arguing the sale would undermine their privacy, and last week the union for American Airlines pilots, which counts some 700 former Spirit pilots among its members, joined them. That group argued the sale could hinder aviation safety.

Ms. Thomson’s mandate was narrow. The ombudsman is appointed to weigh risks to consumers, since federal bankruptcy law builds consumer protections into data sales, and she said her review did not cover whether the deal posed any privacy risk to employees. Lawyers previously told Business Insider that the proposed sale is a reminder that an employee’s work data is generally not private and belongs to the company.

A representative for Spirit gave no additional comment when reached by Business Insider, and Google did not respond to a request for comment. The company has said before that no personally identifying information would change hands. “Google is not buying any personal information from Spirit,” it said. “The information will either be completely excluded or will be deidentified by an independent third party before Google receives the data.”

Monday’s filing also flagged what would happen if the court weighed rival bids, including ones from the AI training companies Mercor and Micro1. Any other buyer would need a fresh consumer privacy review, Ms. Thomson said, and she wrote that she would need more information in particular about a “supply chain security incident” at Mercor earlier this year.

The recommendation helps Google’s case, but the decision rests with the court. A hearing on the proposed sale is scheduled for Oct. 14.