With the downfall of Roe v. Wade last month, tech companies are left to pick up the pieces on suddenly shaky legal terrain.
One such company is Google, which announced in a blog post on Friday that an update is coming to the location history feature associated with Google accounts in the next few weeks. The update will automatically flag and delete any visits to abortion clinics (as well as other facilities like domestic violence shelters and addiction treatment centers) from a user’s location history.
This important because, in a post-Roe world, legal abortion access changes across state lines. U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland has stated in no uncertain terms that the Department of Justice will protect the right to seek an abortion out-of-state, but there’s already legislation being drafted in red states that would punish people who travel for abortions if enshrined into law.
If law enforcement has the authority to punish those who get abortions across state lines, a digital diary of every place a person has visited would naturally be desirable as evidence, hence Google auto-deleting visits to abortion clinics from its logs. There will also be an update to Fitbit to allow users to delete multiple menstrual cycle logs at once, amid fears that data collected by period tracking apps could also be used against people who need abortions.
For what it’s worth, Google said it would “oppose demands that are overly broad or otherwise legally objectionable” when it comes to using data as evidence, but that statement leaves plenty of wiggle room. As always, the best way to avoid having evidence used against you is to eliminate the evidence outright.