US politicians are asking Google to stop location tracking over abortion charges

A group of American politicians has written an open letter to Google asking whether the company wants to stop collecting location data from users. They believe that people who want to have an abortion run the risk of being prosecuted due to the stored location data.

The letter is addressed to Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, and signed by forty-two politicians of the American Democratic political party. It states that far-right actors in the United States can use the location data of users to show that those users have gone looking for abortion options in the world. According to the politicians, they could be prosecuted for this. They refer to US government and judicial services that they claim request location data from Google on a regular basis. For example, in 2020, Google would have received more than 11,000 warrants to share users’ location data with US authorities.

The authors believe that Google has location data of Android users, even when the device is not actively used, whether or not apps are running. In addition, according to the authors, Google receives all location data, even when only a certain third-party app asks for their location. On iPhones, Google can only collect location data when the Google Maps app is running. “Moreover, there is no law that requires Google to collect location data from its users.”

The letter comes later the beginning of May It became known that a majority of the US Supreme Court wants to overturn the landmark ‘Roe v. Wade’ decision from 1973. That ruling serves as a precedent and established the federal constitutional right to abortion in the United States. If this ruling is overturned, each US state can decide for itself whether to ban or restrict abortion.