How Can Big Tech Preserve Reproductive Rights? Cool It With the Data Collection
AUSTIN–A panel about reproductive rights in one of the states most hostile to them offered this concise counsel to technology companies: If you don’t like having to hand over your customers’ sensitive data to prosecutors, don’t collect it in the first place.
“It's a new landscape and we need to think about new interventions to address it,” said Alexandra Reeve Givens, president and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology(Opens in a new window).
“It's been so intense since the Dobbs decision,” said her fellow panelist Cecile Richards, co-chair of the American Bridge(Opens in a new window) political action committee and former president of Planned Parenthood(Opens in a new window), referring to the Supreme Court ruling that overturned 49 years of precedent and a federal right to abortion. “There are definitely people who are afraid of even searching for information.”
And in this context, the data sitting in the servers of tech companies can easily be weaponized by state and local law enforcement with court orders for such information as search histories and stored messages. As panel moderator Nabiha Syed, CEO of the privacy-news site The Markup(Opens in a new window), put it: “Data is not the new oil. It's uranium.”
Givens told companies to mine less of it.
“When they get lawful process from a prosecutor, it can be very hard to ignore those requests,” she said. “They need to hold back on the amount of information they're gathering.”
Richards echoed that thought, telling companies to ask themselves: “What is the least amount of information that you need to be able to provide the product or care that someone needs?”
Google took a small step in that direction in July, when it announced(Opens in a new window) that it
Read more on pcmag.com
