Posted on 12/02/2022 1:19:53 PM PST by nickcarraway
Exclusive: a study shows the company has a long way to go in upholding its pledge to protect users
In the wake of the US supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade, Google pledged fresh policies to protect people’s abortion-related data. But new research has shown the way our location and other personal data is stored remains largely unchanged, raising fears that intimate details of a person’s abortion search could be used to penalize them.
Google responds to tens of thousands of requests each year from law enforcement agencies seeking access to the vast troves of data collected on its users. In one six-month period in 2021, the most recent data publicly available, Google received nearly 47,000 law enforcement requests, affecting more than 100,000 accounts, and responded with some amount of data to 80% of them. The Dobbs decision sparked concerns that such data could be used to prosecute people seeking abortions in states where it is banned – for instance, if they searched for or traveled to an abortion clinic.
Google responded to those concerns by saying it would delete entries for locations deemed “personal”, including “medical facilities like counseling centers, domestic violence shelters, abortion clinics, fertility centers, addiction treatment facilities, weight loss clinics, cosmetic surgery clinics”. The company did not indicate how long after a user visited a “personal” location it would delete the data.
“If our systems identify that someone has visited one of these places, we will delete these entries from Location History soon after they visit,” the company said in July, pledging to make the change “in the coming weeks”.
The tech advocacy group Accountable Tech conducted an experiment in August and October to test Google’s pledge. Using a brand new Android device, researchers with the group analyzed their Google activity timeline, where the company shows
(Excerpt) Read more at theguardian.com ...
Ping
Brave.com has a far superior, and private, search engine. It does not even rely on the google database (unlike duckduckgo, which has become political and uses google)
It’s also useful bc Google will direct you to whoever pays Google the most money.
Google is an extortion racket.
>(unlike duckduckgo, which has become political and uses google)
I believe startpage uses bing. For a fun time, try the Ruskie engine. https://yandex.com
Betting google won’t delete personal data on Republican Supreme Court justices.
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