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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

Why isn't this considered destruction of evidence and thus a crime itself?

It's not illegal to visit an abortion clinic, domestic violence shelter or other similarly-sensitive place.

Suppose you visited someone's house to murder them. Does it count as destruction of evidence to scrub evidence that places you at the crime scene (eg. google location history or your car's dashcam footage)? After all, visiting someone's house isn't a crime either.

When google does it without knowing what you did there, no. You can't knowingly destroy evidence if there isn't a (known) crime.

Okay, here's a new thought experiment: suppose some trump supporters did some illegal activities at a protest (think jan 6th). In typical trump supporter fashion, they also have truth social[1] installed and location tracking was enabled. Would you be fine with truth social scrubbing evidence relating to that protest? After all, showing up to the protest isn't illegal, so it should be perfectly fine to scrub all information relating to the protest. It'd only be illegal if they specifically searched for illegal activity and only scrubbed those.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth_Social

Yes. That's how privacy protection works. Both the good guys and the bad guys benefit equally.

Well, that's the sane way of interpreting it. The alternative is finding some sort of post hoc justification to prevent your opponents for using it.

There’s a nuance here, which is that in your scenario it sounds like truth social made a conscious decision to erase location data focused around this particular event - if that’s the case, and they picked this event specifically, that seems sketchy. Why that event, why just these people, etc.

If, on the other hand, three months before January 6th truth social said “you know what, we are going to delete all location data that is near any government building going forward”, that seems to be to be morally neutral.

The other way to look at it is that this change protects everyone who is at an abortion clinic, whether getting an abortion, protesting abortion, or just happened to be walking by.

Would you also be okay with Google destroying evidence that people went to Jeffrey Epstein's island, since just being there wasn't illegal?

https://twitter.com/dril/status/473265809079693312

No, but if abortion is illegal, knowing you where there can be used as evidence:

https://definitions.uslegal.com/d/destruction-of-evidence

> destruction of evidence that is relevant to a case .. or an inference that such evidence can be unfavorable. ... victim of the spoliation [the state] must prove that the destruction was intentional [it was] and also the destroyed evidence was relevant to the issue ...

Literally what Google is doing, if Google deleted location data of all the J6 rioters this wouldn't even be a question if they deleted evidence, because its abortion, everyones ok with it, double standards.

Being in the vicinity of a clinic isn't a crime.

Apart from the other answers given, states have no jurisdiction to make actions taken in another state illegal.

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