Some employees of Alphabet Incparent company of Googlethey asked the company to stop collecting data on users seeking information on abortion. The employees also sent a petition to the CEO Sundar Pichai.
Google employees are pressuring the company to stop collecting abortion data
The petition, signed by several dthe 650 workershe also asked the company to remove the results of research on pregnancy centers in crisiswhich he said were misleading for those trying to have an abortion.
Alphabet workers union representatives sent the petition to pichai Monday, after it circulated among employees last week, a union spokesman said. At the end of the working day on Wednesday, Pichai he still hadn’t answered. A spokesperson for Google he declined to comment on the petition. Alphabet claimed to have 174,014 full-time employees in late June, in addition to a large number of contract workers.
Technology companies and location data brokers are under greater scrutiny after the Supreme Court ruling on June. Privacy advocates fear prosecutors use mandates to request i data revealing users who have visited abortion clinics o searched for related information. This data could be used to build lawsuits against people accused of having abortions in states that have banned the procedure.
Google, like most tech companies, said of respond to legitimate requests for user data by government agencies and oppose to requests that it deems excessively broad or in any case questionable.
A delicate matter
Google’s management of policies relating to abortion it has become a politically charged issue. Prior to the Supreme Court ruling, more than 20 Congressional Democrats urged Google to take measures per limit the appearance of pregnancy centers in crisis in research related to abortion.
The following month, 17 Republican attorneys general responded with a letter. Here they claimed that they would undertake actions against the company if he had suppressed the findings relating to the pregnancy centers in crisis, which according to the group provide important medical services.
In late June, the Alphabet syndicate released a public statement asking Google to stop saving of “any data that could be used to prosecute users in the United States who exercise their body autonomy “.
In July, Google said it would start a delete automatically data on physical visits to abortion clinics recorded by the company’s products. Pichai later stated that Google “will work on new ways to strengthen and improve these protections over time”.
The petition
This week’s petition pushed the company to go further. In fact, it asks that Google introduce “immediate controls on the privacy of user data for all activities related to health”, such as searches related to reproductive issuesis that stop saving any user information related to abortion services. It also asked Google to correct “misleading search results related to abortion services, eliminating results related to fake abortion providers.”
Among other requests, the workers asked Alphabet to extend some reproductive health benefits to contractorsto put an end to the activities of lobbying through its internal policy action committee and to take measures for limit advertisements on the publishers of “disinformation relating to abortion services”.
The workers who signed the petition asked for Alphabet to create a task force with 50% employee representation to handle abortion-related issues across the company.
Source
Wall Street Journal