The new legal situation in USA after the annulment or repeal of the legislation derived from the sentence of the Roe v. Wade case has raised great concern about the confidentiality of the data of people who want to abort, and seeing a recent report published by Mozilla, it seems that these people have more than enough reasons not to be completely calm.
Until now, few large companies and private institutions in the United States have taken a position on this issue, possibly because it is already dividing the country in two and being in favor of one side or the other can be detrimental to business. . Here it is possibly worth highlighting the position of Google, which, lukewarmly and without official communications, has been making gestures in favor of women who want to abort.
The search giant began by implementing mechanisms that help “forget” the medical clinics visited from the location history. Now it goes a step further clearly label on Google Search and Maps which medical facilities offer the possibility of abortion.
The company wants to provide clear information on this, so if it is not confirmed if a medical facility offers the possibility of abortion, they will be labeled as “may not provide abortions”. Google has commented that this change is being implemented as part of a series of improvements in the way its services display and label search results for certain places.
Google says that the operation will be similar to when searching for a specific brand of COVID-19 vaccine or electric vehicle charging facilities, with some initial local results that show the places that offer this service and with the possibility of expanding the geographic radius of the search if there are none nearby. This means that hospitals and health care facilities that offer abortions will be displayed under the same criteria. The corporation has announced that it intends to extend this feature to more types of venues and facilities. To obtain confirmation of whether or not a place offers a certain service, Google itself calls companies or institutions and works with authorized data sources.
However, these moves by Google may not be pure altruism, but a response to reports published by Bloomberg and The Guardian in which it was reported that the search giant’s services regularly misled people looking for abortion clinics and that in one in ten cases they were sent to a “crisis pregnancy” clinic instead of an abortion clinic. Added to these reports was the internal pressure exerted by more than 600 company employees.
Google has said that the changes introduced are not intended to categorize and that they only intend to provide information, but there are people and media that obviously do not believe this. Whatever the company’s true intentions, if it helps people decide for themselves, that’s fine.
