Employees at Google’s parent company, Alphabet, want to better protect people’s abortion-related location data and search history.
Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP
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Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP
Employees at Google’s parent company, Alphabet, want to better protect people’s abortion-related location data and search history.
Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP
About 650 Google employees have signed a petition asking the company to protect users’ abortion-related location data and search history.
The move comes amid concerns that law enforcement agencies will seek such data from Google to prosecute abortion seekers.
The workers sent the petition Wednesday to top Google Alphabet executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai. Most of the workers belong to the Alphabet Workers Union, according to Bambi Okugawa, a spokeswoman for the group.
“If Google or Facebook or any tech company wants to present the face of being a compassionate company and an ally to people who need reproductive health care or gender-affirming health care, then they need to back that up in their actions by protect privacy.” said Okugawa, who works at a data center in Tennessee, where a law will take effect this month that would outlaw abortion.
After the overthrow of the Supreme Court Roe v. Wade In June, several states passed anti-abortion laws that allow for prosecutions or lawsuits against people who provide or assist in an abortion or help women cross state lines to obtain one.
Concerns about the role of technology in such prosecutions have grown in recent days, particularly after it was revealed that Facebook had turned over private messages between a young woman and her mother in Nebraska to local law enforcement agencies investigating the death of a the fetus. .
The employees also want Google to remove fake abortion providers from search results and cut links to publishers of unreliable health care information.
Okugawa said technology companies such as Google have become major providers of information and are involved in people’s lives. So the demands of the workers provide an opportunity for the company to innovate.
“There are situations where a woman can die if she doesn’t get certain health care services,” she said. “It’s on the tech companies to do what they can to protect them.”
In July, Google said it automatically deletes information about users who visit abortion clinics or other places that could lead to legal trouble.
Each year, Google responds to thousands of subpoenas and search warrants by providing user location and search data to law enforcement investigators.
The workers also demanded that the company provide travel benefits to contract staff who must travel overseas to receive abortion services.
“It’s very fair for us as a union to say that you should offer the contractors — the security staff and the vendors — the same benefits that we get,” Okugawa said, on behalf of members of the Alphabet Workers Union.
Many tech companies, including Alphabet, recently announced policies to protect employees from paying for out-of-state travel to receive abortion care. Google responded by sending NPR a link to benefit claims for its contractors, which does not specify details about such expenses.
