Google will delete location history data for abortion clinic visits | Hacker News Reader

Google will delete location history data for abortion clinic visits

theguardian.com

29 pointsrntn28 comments

Will it leave telling holes and what about locations near clinics as mindful from Google Maps in dense area's how it thinks you went to one shop when you did not and just happened to be near there.

Would be better if it randomly shifted visits to nearby stores to mask things instead of telling holes in the data.

I think the idea is that while any person could probably connect the dots, in a courtroom the fact that they were around the clinic is purely circumstantial and therefore insufficient to prove someone got an abortion.

That won't help much with civil lawsuit states like Texas then.

Well for Texans they could just break into Mexico over the border and get an abortion there as it was legalised in Mexico in 2021. Ironic I know. But the whole prospect of border patrols/checks noting who is pregnant enterying Mexico and suddenly not upon return is an aspect that may well come to pass.

The commenter was referring to the Texas law that allows anybody to sue someone in civil court if they have evidence they got an abortion. Texans going to Mexico would still open them up to these lawsuits.

How can that work as a law? More so it will only encourage `accidents` to facilitate loss of pregancy, which will only further endager life due to fear of being sued by some Texan. Really is shocking and deeply worrying.

>How can that work as a law?

It cannot, and they don't care that it cannot. The cruelty is the point.

> noting who is pregnant enterying Mexico and suddenly not upon return

Abortion is legal up to 12 weeks in Mexico. As a result, anyone showing up even at peak 12 weeks would not be visibly pregnant from outside the car.

Okay now can they do they for all visits, for everyone now?

The idea is that abolishing row v. wade = "bad for privacy" = tech companies will now start tracking your abortions

This is complete hogwash, it's nothing but pure hysteria really

When Germany fell to fascism, the fascists found lists of people they don't like and used it to hunt them down and kill them.

There might be some histeria somewhere in all this. But the tech companies didn't start making the lists. They've always been making the lists.

And privacy proponents are right to not want to be on a bunch of lists that are one subpoena or purchase away from being a kill list.

This is the basic reasoning behind why people are so opposed to a "national gun registry".

When your comment history has comments that say "objective morality is real and comes from the bible" either this post is satire and you like typing out unobvious jokes, or this post was made intentionally in bad faith ignoring all evidence from both tech companies behavior and politicians stated intents.

My comment history has none of that, and I agree with the parent comment. Would you agree with the comment if I had wrote it instead?

No, I would state that you're in denial of objective reality in a different way than the parent comment.

When they inevitably drag me off to a labor camp someday I'll be sure to tell them Joey Bananas on Hacker News was one of my closest collaborators. Then I'll remind you about this post over a nice hot bowl of gruel, and see if you've changed our mind.

Are you using your phone ... or is your phone using you?

Yes.

If they can delete it, can they create it?

Yes. They can delete it, they can create it, they can mutate it. That’s how it works when you send information about yourself to somebody else for them to store on their hard drives. This is true utterly irrespective of whether they in fact delete it (or do any other of those things).

Obviously yes

How noble of them. They really care about their users, except when they don't[1].

[1]: https://www.propublica.org/article/google-russia-rutarget-sb...

Great so when I'm accused of murder while I was at planned Parenthood, I have no alibi.

The staff at Planned Parenthood is not good enough?

No, for several reasons.

including: (1) you have much more legal authority to request your OWN records from an entity, than to compel a 3rd party to testify on your behalf, (2) waaay simpler/cheaper than getting witness testimony etc, (3) also applies to fertility centers and addiction centers (wtf?)

And pedantically following up from your rebuttal: what if Planned Parenthood was closed when you got there and no one there actually saw you?

I think it's short-sighted and wrong of Google to subvert the integrity of location history. #IANAL but location history has been very useful to me (yes, in court).

Not to mention some women may WANT to establish that they tried to get an abortion on so-and-so date. It might end up being devastating when they discover after the fact that Google has/had scrubbed their location history.

I'm highly pro-choice but this feels less than useless to me.

Even from a political perspective this may be an own goal:

(1) it reinforces idea that abortion/addiction/etc is something to be ashamed of [no],

(2) the impact will be felt in only "abortion-friendly states": umm there will be no abortion centers to visit in "abortion-unfriendly states".

On the other hand, the Google Timeline only records that your phone was there, so very weak evidence that you were not somewhere else. Especially if no one sees you because it's closed. In addition, many phones (or emulators) will let you fake your GPS position which Google Maps will happily record.

I don't understand why we are so keen on trusting algorithms above people. In this case, algorithms that are not remotely meant to be trusted by third-parties but are meant to keep a history for oneself.

==========

(IANAL but following up in case it helps anyone else that comes upon this thread: please ignore this thread, including what I write, and make up your own mind)

In general, the law isn't as naive and zero-and-one as this commenter seems to assume. e.g., the law formally recognizes this by having different standards of proof in different situations.

The basic point is that a timeline that is officially-acknowledged to be arbitrarily (?) filtered CAN end up having negative unintended consequences or increasing the burden, even for the people sought to be "helped".

====

Now let me approach this from a UX design perspective and maybe the other perspective will be easier for me to understand:

I'm happy to read your case for why a filtered timeline is the best UX for this situation [Even if I had wanted to make any change, I would have gone for a second-level of confirmation for all timeline screens, like Takeout].

I have no idea what you are asking me, especially why we are now talking about "UX".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com