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upstart [soylentnews.org] writes:

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Perspective | Okay, Google: To protect women, collect less data about everyone [washingtonpost.com]:

“We the users want Google to delete our intimate data. Our rights depend on it.”

Of course, Google isn’t alone in collecting intimate information. In the past week, many concerned patients have focused on the privacy practices of period-tracking apps [washingtonpost.com], which store reproductive health data. Other Big Tech companies facilitate data grabs, too: Facebook watches you [washingtonpost.com] even when you’re not using it, Amazon’s products record you [washingtonpost.com], and Apple makes it too easy for iPhone apps to track you [washingtonpost.com].

But in many ways, Google’s reach into the life of a person seeking reproductive health information is unrivaled. Just one example: For much of this year in the United States, Google searches for “Am I pregnant?” have outranked [google.com] “Do I have covid?” Searches for the emergency contraceptive drug “Plan B” far outnumber both combined.

The sheer volume of Google’s surveillance also makes it likely the most attractive police target. Across all topics, it received more than 40,000 subpoenas and search warrants in the United States in the first half of 2021 alone.

That means whatever Google does next, it can’t remain neutral [bloomberg.com] — and will set the tone for how the entire industry balances our rights with the business imperative to grab more data.

Google didn’t make an executive available for an interview. “We’ve long focused on minimizing the data we use to make our products helpful and on building tools that allow people to control and delete data across our platforms,” emailed spokesman Matt Bryant.

Starting in 2019, Google began offering users a setting to retain certain data for select periods of time rather than infinity, and in 2020 it made the default 18 months [blog.google].

In reality, Google knows very few people use its controls, and even 18 months is a very long time. The only way to really protect its users is to make whole swaths of data off-limits by default.

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