Google promised to delete sensitive data. It logged my abortion clinic visit

Best practice still has to remain to turn off your phone, or at least put it in airplane mode, before you leave the house if you need more privacy.

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>To test Google’s privacy promise, I’ve been running an experiment. Over the last few weeks, I visited a dozen abortion clinics, medical centers and fertility specialists around California, using Google Maps for directions. A colleague visited two more in Florida.

In about half of the visits, I watched Google retain a map of my activity

you say turn it off but how many people know that option even exists?

If you are just sitting in a shared parking lot with other business around how are they supposed to label the location? If it gets labeled as probably being the coffee shop, then its not a visit to a sensitive location which needs to get deleted.

Scenario: You navigate to a sensitive location. Close out Google Maps and do whatever. Now they forget where you navigated to, because it is sensitive. Some time later, you open Google Maps and navigate home. It now has an unknown location as your starting point, and guesses somewhere close. So it picks up the coffee shop as potential. And uses that as the starting point for the new trip. How could they also remove that coffee shop? That would require retaining the fact that you were at a sensitive location there.

Also note that the lack of data around sensitive locations in your history may be an indicator for those looking for it. If you had gone to the coffee shop it would show up as the coffee shop, but instead it shows up as no data. I would much rather it have a nearby plausible location than a total gap in the data.

And I think the most important part of it is they don't have any history of anyone going to that specific location. So a subpoena asking for everyone who went to that location returns 0 results. Getting a subpoena for everyone who went to the neighborhood or the coffee shop, should be harder, and even if they get it its not likely to provide any useful info.

This puts people at personal risk, erodes their faith in tech, and provides an image of political grandstanding. (Washington should protect you, but Google will is a major message [0]). I'm defending this guy. He saw Google make a promise it couldn't keep, ran real world tests, and told the world where they fell short. I wish there was more we could do to keep tech companies accountable for failed promises, but this is the bare minimum.

[0] https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/protecting-pe...

Othrwise I agree with the comment... if you want a large corporation to have your location data, don't complain if that large corporation has your location data.

It's highly unlikely they lack the capability to /dev/null this location history.

I wonder if Google allow people to run advertising campaigns targeting people in abortion clinic waiting rooms?

You must not be bothered by being constantly nagged to turn it on. From TFA:

"many Google services — from search to maps — try to get you to hand over location data with the promise of a better experience."

Moreover, people only have to give in to Google's pleas and hollow promises once. Five years down the road when they're in a desperate situation, their last thought is going to be "I'd better turn off a trillion-dollar advertising company's invasive tracking of my every movement before I engage in this life-altering behavior."

Google told the public that it didn't need to fear that particular feature.

From TFA: Google offered a partial solution: It would proactively delete its trove of location data when people visited “particularly personal” places, including abortion clinics, hospitals and shelters.

But I want this data, and it's a dilemma for me. I want to look back in my past 20 years from now and see where I was at every moment, it's super cool information to have and would help me inform my history.

This is probably a good question for all you guys. Is there an open source alternative location data logger that I could use instead for something like this?

Edit: Apparently people disliked my phrasing. Before Apple added the yellow dot to indicate the microphone was live I was far more sensitive to leaving phones behind. Now, I've relaxed somewhat. Absent concerns about intelligence service level eavesdroppers (which is a real concern for some situations), is there really still a threat there?

Granted, I also don't have the same level of concern that is being expressed here. Nor the level of fear that my phone is always listening. Seems rather unlikely, all told. Unless I'm the target of an investigation or the victim of a stalker. In both cases, I'm far more likely to have active threats against my privacy than a passive phone of my own.

That said, you're correct that Planned Parenthood offers many more services than just abortion, but the category they'd be in is "sexual and reproductive healthcare," not "maternity care."

Many advocates are pushing for "abortion forward" language to de-stigmatize the procedure, and (at least in Canada) some clinics are opting for less euphemistic names.[0]

0. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/abortion-clinics-language-1.6...

Most of us have to accept tradeoffs of convenience vs security, privacy vs durability of data, cost vs benefit.

And we have to rely on the sometimes erroneous, sometimes fraudulent claims of various companies and people when making tradeoff decisions, knowing they are generally more or less accurate but occasionally totally wrong.

You make it sound like one has to go out of their way to enable it.

Pretty sure it’s one of several steps you click through when you sign up for a Google account. And so most people will probably accept it.

Add to that what the article is actually about. Google promised to remove visits to sensitive locations, but the visits were not removed.

"Google privacy setting tested and doesn't work" seems like a pretty important headline to me.

Lazy coding.

I didn't notice a simple, practical piece of advice: Leave your phone at home.

It would be inconvenient but if I did something I wanted to keep very private, I would leave my phone on my desk while I did it. A change in my activity or its absence reveals something possibly happened, but at least doesn't spell it out.

The state can build their own case.

Rubbish. The Onion Router (TOR) is specifically built for people trying to evade authoritarian governments with "intrusive and oppressive laws". GPG. E2EE. Technology can't _guarantee_ that an authoritarian government won't sniff you out, but it can at least partially protect you.

"also vote out those politicians and parties who are trying to push these laws at the local, state, and national level."

That's not realistic for a number of reasons.

In the US, almost all politicians want to create a surveillance state -- they just disagree on who they want to target. And lots of voters support Their Side on this.

Putting aside partisanship, voters overwhelmingly support laws targeting Sex Offenders, including mass surveillance ostensibly for hunting down the witches.

But let's say that we magically vote out all of the authoritarians tomorrow -- what about in two years? 10 years? 20 years? One of the issues with this data collection is that it is _forever_. In 20 years, the government can go to Google and ask them what you were doing today, and Google has that because the data lasts _forever_.

So, yes, we should target authoritarian politicians and vote them out. We should also persuade the populace that mass surveillance is always a bad idea. We should avoid companies that are deliberately surveilling us. And finally, we should specifically use technology to protect us from surveillance, because the first three things aren't very realistic.