Google promised to remove location data about visits to abortion clinics. That didn’t happen, says research

A year and a half has passed since Google first promised to remove all location data about users’ visits to abortion clinics, with minimal progress. The move would have made it more difficult for law enforcement to use that information to investigate or prosecute people seeking abortions in states where the procedure is banned or otherwise restricted. A new study shows that Google still retains location history data 50% of the time.

Google’s original pledge, made in July 2022, came shortly after the Supreme Court’s decision to end federal abortion protections. The tech giant said it would remove listings for locations deemed “personal” or sensitive, including “medical facilities such as counseling centers, domestic violence shelters and abortion clinics.” No timeline was given for when the company would implement the new policy. Five months after that promise, research first reported by The Guardian and conducted by the tech advocacy group Accountable Tech in November 2022 found that Google was still not masking that location data in all cases.

At the time, Google said it was prioritizing user privacy and had rolled out the changes to its location retention policy in early 2022 “as promised,” but that the system should not have detected that the user had visited a Planned Parenthood clinic in some of the cases.

In its latest research, reviewed exclusively by The Guardian, Accountable Tech found that the company still didn’t delete location history in all cases as promised, even though Google’s retention rate improved slightly. The extent to which location information was retained dropped from 60% of cases tested, a measurement five months after Google’s commitment, to 50% of cases tested in the most recent experiment. Google Maps product director Marlo McGriff disputed the study’s findings.

“We are committed to removing particularly personal places from Location History when these places are identified by our systems – any claims that we do not do so are patently false or misleading,” McGriff said in a statement.

Accountable Tech replicated the 2022 survey to measure Google’s progress. Researchers used a brand new Android device to guide themselves to abortion clinics and then tested what location data was stored about their journey. This time, the researchers conducted eight tests in seven states: Pennsylvania, Texas, Nevada, Florida, New York, Georgia and North Carolina. In four of the eight tests, the route to Planned Parenthood was retained in the device’s location history, although the clinic name was removed. Data about abortion clinic searches was still retained in the web and activity history, as in the researchers’ first test.

“With the same odds as a coin toss, an abortion seeker’s location data could still be retained and used to prosecute him or her,” the study reads. “Additionally, as we’ve seen from the experiments, Google still retains data from location searches, and likely other incriminating data as well – from email to Google search data.”

In examples from the research that The Guardian shared with Google, McGriff says the system did not detect a visit to Planned Parenthood and thus did not remove the route. In another case, Accountable Tech researchers visited the Central Harlem Sexual Health Clinic, run by New York City Health and Hospitals. Google said that under the new policy, a general health facility that provides various services other than abortion care should not be categorized as a “personal” location, meaning the information could be retained.

Google’s policies regarding the storage of location and other user data sparked renewed concerns in the wake of the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health case that overturned Roe v Wade. The company receives and responds to tens of thousands of law enforcement requests for access to its vast trove of user data and fulfills 80% of these requests with some level of information, according to the company’s government transparency report.

Police and law enforcement agencies have also increasingly used a new category of search warrants called “reverse search warrants.” Falling into that category are geofence location warrants, which police use to create a list of suspects by seeking information about all users whose devices were detected in a particular place at a certain time. Many activists worry that law enforcement would use these search warrants to collect data to track and prosecute people seeking abortions.

Just weeks ago, Google announced that it planned to change the way location history data was stored for all users, in a way that could make responding to geofence warrants effectively impossible. The changes include storing location data on users’ devices by default; encrypting location data backed up to Google’s cloud storage and deleting location data after three months.

While Accountable Tech called Google’s announcement a “step in the right direction,” the group said the company’s failure to meet previous commitments to protect location data shows that Google “cannot be trusted to meet its public obligations arrive on the timeline it promises.”

“We cannot take the company at its word,” the group writes in its research.