For days after the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, big tech companies remained silent on what they would do with their troves of newly incriminating data on women in America. Then last Friday, as the country set off for the holiday weekend, Alphabet Inc.’s Google piped up. It offered a pledge to help women that ultimately rang hollow and showed how masterfully it guards its business. Beginning in a few weeks, the company will automatically delete the location history of anyone who visits a “personal” place like an abortion clinic, weight loss center or domestic violence shelter, the company said in a blog post.
The announcement drew cautious praise from civil liberties advocates. But many said that Google needed to go further and delete all location data and search queries. After all, why should engineers at a tech company be the ones to decide which addresses are sensitive? Would they obscure underground abortion practitioners, too? And what is the point of deleting a woman’s location data if police can still see her web searches, including that she googled “Planned Parenthood”?
For all the hopes that American women will become like undercover agents who use burner phones, anonymizing browser extensions and DuckDuckGo, a privacy-oriented search engine, to protect themselves when they need an abortion, the vast majority of women will still go to Google. Searches for “abortion clinic near me” surged on June 24, the day the Supreme Court announced its ruling, far outranking searches for “Do I have COVID?” Google’s inviting search bar has become humanity’s first port of call for any new dilemma, a reflex as common as drinking water when you’re thirsty.
