Democrats Call on Google to Curb Location Tracking to Protect Women Seeking Abortions
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More than 40 Democratic lawmakers sent a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Tuesday asking the company to stop collecting and storing “unnecessary” location data over concern that prosecutors could use that data to bring criminal charges against women who have abortions if Roe v. Wade is overturned.
The lawmakers, led by Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon and Representative Anna Eshoo of California, sent the letter to Pichai weeks after a leaked draft majority opinion recently revealed the Supreme Court may be poised to overturn Roe v. Wade, returning the question of abortion to the states.
“We believe that abortion is health care. We will fight tooth and nail to ensure that it remains recognized as a fundamental right, and that all people in the United States have control over their own bodies,” wrote the group, which also included Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York.
“That said, we are concerned that, in a world in which abortion could be made illegal, Google’s current practice of collecting and retaining extensive records of cell phone location data will allow it to become a tool for far-right extremists looking to crack down on people seeking reproductive health care,” the letter added.
The group expressed concern that geofence warrants, in which law enforcement agencies ask tech companies to turn over all data on devices that have passed through a certain area during a specific timeframe, could be used to identify women seeking or helping with an abortion if Roe v. Wade is overturned.
Google received more than 10,000 geofence warrants in 2020, according to the lawmakers. The warrants have been used to help identify and charge January 6 Capitol rioters, as well as to track Black Lives Matter protesters and to investigate anything from bank robberies to break-ins.
“If abortion is made illegal by the far-right Supreme Court and Republican lawmakers, it is inevitable that right-wing prosecutors will obtain legal warrants to hunt down, prosecute and jail women for obtaining critical reproductive health care,” the lawmakers wrote. “The only way to protect your customers’ location data from such outrageous government surveillance is to not keep it in the first place.”
“Americans who can afford an iPhone have greater privacy from government surveillance of their movements than the tens of millions Americans using Android devices,” the letter adds, noting that Apple has taken steps to minimize location data retention.
The lawmakers call on Google to alter its location data collection practices so that device data is collected at an aggregate level, rather than on an individual basis and is not kept longer than needed.
