Google introduced Friday it might delete customers’ location historical past once 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 submit. “This change will take effect in the coming weeks.”
Other locations from which Google is not going to retailer location information embody fertility centres, habit remedy services, and weight reduction clinics.
The announcement comes every week after the US Supreme Court made the tectonic resolution 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 data they acquire to keep away from it being utilized by legislation enforcement for abortion investigations and prosecutions.
Fitzpatrick additionally sought to reassure customers that the corporate takes information 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 information 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 proper to sue docs who carry out abortions — or anybody who helps facilitate them.
That led a bunch of prime Democratic lawmakers in May to ship a letter to Google chief govt Sundar Pichai, asking him to cease gathering smartphone location information lest it grow to be “a tool for far-right extremists looking to crack down on people seeking reproductive health care.”
Ever because the SC ruling, there was a number of bulletins by social media platforms to take away abortion-related information. 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 dealing with new calls to restrict that monitoring and surveillance. One concern is that legislation enforcement or vigilantes may use these information troves towards folks searching for methods to finish undesirable pregnancies.
History has repeatedly demonstrated that at any time when folks’s private information is tracked and saved, there’s all the time a danger that it may very well be misused or abused. With the Supreme Court’s Friday overruling of the 1973 Roe vs Wade resolution that legalized abortion, collected location information, textual content messages, search histories, emails and seemingly innocuous interval and ovulation-tracking apps may very well 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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