Opinion: Google should delete abortion search queries too

An American woman’s location data or search queries are valuable to Google because they can help it direct relevant ads to her on, say, YouTube. — Coffee work photo created by Racool_studio - www.freepik.com

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 centre 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”?