Google says it will delete location data when users visit abortion clinics

July 2, 2022

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Google said Friday that it would delete abortion clinic visits from the location history of its users, in the company’s first effort to address how it will handle sensitive data in the wake of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.

The location data change will take place in the coming weeks, Jen Fitzpatrick, a Google senior vice president, wrote in a blog post. The policy will also apply to trips to fertility clinics, domestic violence shelters, addiction treatment facilities and ..

The overturning of roe has extra extensively renewed questions about how a great deal data and virtual trails humans have produced, which might be used to surveil or target folks that try to get an abortion. In states that permit bans or different limits on abortion, law enforcement is predicted to be targeted on taking motion in opposition to medical providers, but statistics about individuals – which include vicinity facts, payments information and greater – is not difficult to attain via records agents and different resources.

The alphabet employees union, a group representing extra than 800 those who paintings for google’s figure business enterprise, alphabet, demanded tuesday that the hunt massive delete any personal statistics that law enforcement ought to try to use to prosecute individuals who are getting abortions.

With friday’s assertion, even as google will delete a few vicinity information, it did no longer decide to automatically deleting search data about abortions, which may additionally come to be popular. Customers have to in my view opt to delete their seek records.