We contacted Google about the letter yesterday and will update this article if we hear back.
Exactly how Google’s location privacy settings work is a matter of confusion even for some Googlers. As we wrote in August 2020, documents from a consumer fraud lawsuit filed by the state of Arizona against Google “show that company employees knew and discussed among themselves that the company’s location privacy settings were confusing and potentially misleading’.
Democrats say iPhone users have more privacy
Because many of the cheaper smartphones use Android, lawmakers have warned of a “digital divide” that affects the privacy of low-income people:
No law requires Google to collect and store records of every movement of its customers. Apple has shown that there is no need for smartphone companies to maintain invasive databases to track the location of their customers. Google’s deliberate choice to do this is creating a new digital divide where privacy and security are luxuries. Americans who can afford an iPhone have more privacy from government surveillance of their movements than the tens of millions of Americans using Android devices.
While Google uses location data to target online ads, the company often turns the data over to law enforcement officials who obtain court orders, the Democrats wrote. “This includes dragnet ‘geofencing’ warrants requesting data on anyone who was near a particular location at a given time,” they wrote, adding that “Google received 11,554 geofencing warrants in 2020.”
iPhones also use location services, although lawmakers seem happy with Apple’s privacy promises. Among other things, Apple says that if Location Services is turned on, geotagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and cell towers are sent “in anonymous and encrypted form to Apple” to expand “a crowdsourced database for Wi-Fi Location of Fi hotspot and cell towers.”
With Find My, which can locate lost devices, Apple says that it “saves location information and makes it available to you for 24 hours, then it’s deleted” and that “device location services information is stored every individual device and Apple cannot retrieve this information from any particular device.
post-Rowe State abortion laws
Assuming the Supreme Court reversed Roe v. Wadethere may be more state laws such as the recently passed Texas Heartbeat Act, which prohibits abortions once a “fetal heartbeat” can be detected. The law defines this as “cardiac activity or steady and repetitive rhythmic contraction of the fetal heart within the gestational sac.” This effectively bans abortions after six weeks, and state law allows private citizens to file lawsuits to obtain injunctions and compensation of at least $10,000 for an abortion.
These lawsuits can be brought against anyone who “performs or induces an abortion” in violation of the Texas Heartbeat Act, or anyone who “knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets” an abortion after a heartbeat is detected of the fetus. Aiding or abetting includes “paying for or reimbursing the cost of an abortion through insurance or otherwise if the abortion is performed or induced in violation of this subchapter.” Civil suits can also be brought against anyone who “intends to engage in the conduct” described in the law.
The Texas law does not allow for the exact scenario that Democrats warned in their letter, where prosecutors could jail women who have abortions. But states will have more leeway to introduce stricter anti-abortion laws or bans after the repeal Roe v. Wade.
The Guttmacher Institute, a pro-choice research group, says that “26 states are certain or likely to ban abortion without Rowe.” Many of these states have laws that were passed before 1973 Roe v. Wade decision and never repealed, laws that were passed afterward Rowe but currently blocked by court order or “trigger” bans that would “go into effect automatically or by prompt state action if Rowe no longer applies.”
This story originally appeared on Ars Technica.
