In the United States, abortion is illegal in 12 states. Despite Google’s commitments, made last July, to remove abortion-related search and location data, new analysis shows that the search engine still largely stores this data.
The Accountable Tech collective ran an experiment in August and October to test Google’s engagement. But the group found that the routes to abortion clinics or Planned Parenthood were stored in the logs for weeks. They also observed that abortion-related searches were saved in the user’s account and history. “Any information collected by Google is potentially subject to law enforcement requests,” Accountable Tech said in its investigation.
The collective’s research was conducted to be as close as possible to the research conducted by a person seeking an abortion. So, for a similar experiment, Giliann Karon, a researcher at Accountable Tech, traveled from Ohio to Pennsylvania to visit a Planned Parenthood branch. She then turned on Google Maps.
It accepted all the phone’s default privacy settings, which meant geolocation was turned off. Later, the researcher discovered that her location and searches were recorded by Google and were not removed even several months later.
However, last July, Google promised to remove the part of the history in question and the location of a person doing an abortion search. But in the face of Accountable Tech’s observations, Google was forced to react.
Winnie King, spokeswoman for Google, reminds the Guardn that “users can disable the Web and App Activity settings at any time, delete some or all of their data manually, or choose to automatically delete data as it occurs.”
Google’s main difficulty is that its entire system is based on data collection and advertising. And Jackie Singh, director of technology and operations at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, interviewed by The Guardian to recall that “the truth is that we cannot expect an advertising giant like Google, which has become powerful by monetizing the collection of our data, be careful adapt your many systems to avoid monitoring populations similar to those seeking abortion information.”
For its part, Google would dispense with a case similar to that of Facebook. Last August, a 17-year-old girl was arrested in Nebraska for using an abortion pill. And the police would have relied on her Facebook conversations to have the proof, then she was prosecuted for having an abortion beyond 20 weeks, the term in this State.
Source: BFM TV
