More than 40 Democratic members of the US Congress are asking Google to cease what they see because the pointless assortment and retention of individuals’s location knowledge, arguing the data may very well be used to determine ladies looking for abortions.
In a letter despatched Tuesday to Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google dad or mum Alphabet, the lawmakers specific concern that if abortion have been to grow to be unlawful within the US, the corporate’s “current practice of collecting and retaining extensive records of cell phone location data will allow it to become a tool for far-right extremists looking to crack down on people seeking reproductive health care.”
If the US Supreme Court upends the 1973 decision that legalized abortion — as a draft opinion suggests it may in the coming weeks — pregnancies could be surveilled and the data shared with police or sold to vigilantes, privacy experts fear.
Google, specifically, stores “historic location details about a whole lot of hundreds of thousands of smartphone customers,” the letter notes, “which it routinely shares with authorities companies.”
Representatives for Alphabet didn’t instantly reply to a message for remark. Tech firms have largely tried to remain out of the abortion debate. Meta, which owns Facebook, has reportedly reminded staff that they’re prohibited from discussing abortion in office communication channels. Meta didn’t reply to a request for remark.
In their letter, the Democrats, who have been led by Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon, asks Google to cease accumulating and protecting data of their clients’ each motion.
Law enforcement officers routinely acquire court docket orders forcing Google to show over its clients’ location info, the letter notes. This contains “geofence” orders, that are requests for Google to supply knowledge about everybody who was close to a particular location at a particular time.
Google obtained 11,554 geofence warrants in 2020, in keeping with the corporate. It has not mentioned what number of of these it complied with.
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