Google introduced Friday it might delete customers’ location historical past after they go to abortion clinics, home violence shelters and different locations the place privateness is sought.
“If our systems identify that someone has visited one of these places, we will delete these entries from Location History soon after they visit,” Jen Fitzpatrick, a senior vp at Google, wrote in a weblog publish. “This change will take effect in the coming weeks.”
Other locations from which Google won’t retailer location knowledge embrace fertility centres, dependancy therapy services, and weight reduction clinics.
The announcement comes per week after the US Supreme Court made the tectonic choice to strip American girls of constitutional rights to abortion, main a dozen states to ban or severely limit the process and prompting mass protests throughout the nation.
Activists and politicians have been calling on Google and different tech giants to restrict the quantity of knowledge they accumulate to keep away from it being utilized by regulation enforcement for abortion investigations and prosecutions.
Fitzpatrick additionally sought to reassure customers that the corporate takes knowledge privateness significantly.
“Google has a long track record of pushing back on overly broad demands from law enforcement, including objecting to some demands entirely,” she wrote.
“We take into account the privacy and security expectations of people using our products, and we notify people when we comply with government demands.”
Concerns over smartphone knowledge and reproductive rights arose even earlier than the Supreme Court ruling, when a number of conservative US states in current months handed legal guidelines that give members of the general public the fitting to sue medical doctors who carry out abortions — or anybody who helps facilitate them.
That led a gaggle of prime Democratic lawmakers in May to ship a letter to Google chief government Sundar Pichai, asking him to cease amassing smartphone location knowledge lest it change into “a tool for far-right extremists looking to crack down on people seeking reproductive health care.”
Ever for the reason that SC ruling, there was a number of bulletins by social media platforms to take away abortion-related knowledge. With abortion now or quickly to be unlawful in over a dozen states and severely restricted in lots of extra, Big Tech corporations that vacuum up private particulars of their customers are going through new calls to restrict that monitoring and surveillance. One worry is that regulation enforcement or vigilantes may use these knowledge troves in opposition to individuals in search of methods to finish undesirable pregnancies.
History has repeatedly demonstrated that each time individuals’s private knowledge is tracked and saved, there’s at all times a danger that it might be misused or abused. With the Supreme Court’s Friday overruling of the 1973 Roe vs Wade choice that legalized abortion, collected location knowledge, textual content messages, search histories, emails and seemingly innocuous interval and ovulation-tracking apps might be used to prosecute individuals who search an abortion — or medical look after a miscarriage — in addition to those that help them.
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