Google's Data Capture Endangers Abortion Seekers
Sundar Pichai and Google leadership
Google collects a huge amount of sensitive location data. Now that Roe has been overturned, Google’s data stockpile could be weaponized to identify and target people seeking abortions. Sign the open letter to tell Google to protect people receiving abortions, and immediately stop unnecessarily collecting and retaining customer location data.
Google is currently complicit in the criminalization of people seeking reproductive health care. That’s because Google stores historical location data about hundreds of millions of smartphone users, which it routinely shares with government agencies through “geofence” orders that unmask the identities of anyone who traveled to a specific place at a specific time—like an abortion clinic on a specific day. Google received 11,554 such geofence warrants in 2020.
The only way to protect Americans’ location data from outrageous government surveillance is for Google not to keep it in the first place.
Tell Google: to protect people seeking abortions, stop collecting and retaining unnecessary location data.
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To:
Sundar Pichai and Google leadership
From:
[Your Name]
We write to urge you to stop unnecessarily collecting and retaining customer location data, to prevent that information from being used to identify people who have obtained abortions.
Google collects a huge amount of sensitive location data. Now that Roe has been overturned, Google’s data stockpile could be weaponized to identify and target people seeking abortions.
While Google collects and retains customer location data for various business purposes, including to target online ads, Google is not the only entity to make use of this data. Law enforcement officials routinely obtain court orders forcing Google to turn over its customers' location information. This includes dragnet “geofence” orders demanding data about everyone who was near a particular location at a given time. In fact, according to data published by Google, one quarter of the law enforcement orders that your company receives each year are for these dragnet geofence orders; Google received 11,554 geofence warrants in 2020.
Google is not required to collect and keep records of its customers’ every movement. Apple has shown that it is not necessary for smartphone companies to retain invasive tracking databases of their customers' locations. Google's intentional choice to do so is creating a new digital divide, in which privacy and security are made a luxury.
Post-Roe, the only way to protect your customers’ location data from such outrageous anti-abortion government surveillance is to not keep it in the first place.
To that end, we urge you to promptly reform your data collection and retention practices, so that Google no longer collects unnecessary customer location data nor retains any non-aggregate location data about individual customers, whether in identifiable or anonymized form. Google cannot allow its online advertising-focused digital infrastructure to be weaponized against people seeking abortions.
Thank you for your attention to this important matter.