The company behind the dominant Internet search engine and the Android software that powers most of the world’s smartphones outlined the new privacy protections in a blog post on Friday. In addition to automatically deleting visits to abortion clinics, Google also listed counseling centers, fertility centers, addiction treatment facilities, weight loss clinics and plastic surgery clinics as other destinations that will be deleted from users’ location histories. Users have always had the option to edit their location histories themselves, but Google will proactively do this for them as an added layer of protection. “We’re committed to providing strong privacy protections for people who use our products, and we’ll continue to look for new ways to strengthen and improve those protections,” Google senior vice president Jen Fitzpatrick wrote in a blog post. The commitment comes amid escalating pressure on Google and other big tech companies to do more to protect the troves of sensitive personal information across their digital services and products from government authorities and other outsiders. Calls for tighter privacy controls have been fueled by the recent US Supreme Court ruling that overturned the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion. That reversal could make abortion illegal in more than a dozen states, raising the specter that records about people’s location, texts, searches and emails could be used in prosecutions of abortion procedures or even for medical care requested in a miscarriage. Like other tech companies, Google receives thousands of government requests each year for digital user records as part of investigations into misconduct. Google says it fights back against search warrants and other demands that are overly broad or appear unreasonable.
