Google is failing to protect users and contractors post-Roe, workers say

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade in June, Alphabet was one of several major tech companies that attempted to extend some flexibility to its workers seeking care, including those who potentially would need to travel out of state. It likewise made the narrow decision to delete users' location data when they visited abortion providing clinics, albeit only in response to legislative pressure. Since then, however, Alphabet has been effectively silent on the issue, and a group of its own workers are stepping up to demand a broader response on behalf of their colleagues and users at large.

The petition (reproduced in full below) was sent on Monday to a group of six executives, including CEO Sundar Pichai, and has been signed by over 650 workers at the company. Thus far, the executives have yet to respond. Responding to a request for comment Alphabet told Engadget "we have nothing specific to add on this letter."

First and foremost, the workers ask that Alphabet's new policies on travel and reimbursement for out-of-state care be extended to the company's temps, vendors and contractors (TVCs), a workforce which, by some estimates, outnumbers its full-time employees. This includes increasing the daily reimbursement from $50 to $150 and changing the minimum number of sick days to seven. "Many of our fellow TVCs have three days of sick leave, whereas full-time employees have unlimited [days]," Alejandra Beatty, a technical program manager with subsidiary Verily and a member of Alphabet Workers Union (AWU), told Engadget. "Everybody deserves seven, especially when we're still dealing with COVID-19 outbreaks."

Engadget first asked Alphabet if these travel and reimbursement policies would extend to TVCs shortly after the Supreme Court's decision and received no reply. This implicit exclusion was immediately criticized by AWU and the company seemingly has not rectified the discrepancy in treatment in the two months since.

The petition further seeks to strengthen Alphabet's data privacy policies around these sensitive subjects. "Searching for reproductive justice, gender-affirming care, and abortion access information on Google must never be saved, handed over to law enforcement, or treated as a crime," the document states. In practice, this would not only broaden the scope of the company's new policy on location data related to abortion providing clinics — both by expanding to new categories of sensitive information, as well as new kinds of non-locational data — but it would also de facto require it to change how that information is logged in the first place. Law enforcement, armed with a court order, could force Alphabet to turn over data in its possession, and the only viable workaround would be not having that data. "We think it's more important that we are on the side of 'let's just not have the data,'" Beatty said, "because you can't tell a company to just say 'no' to any subpoena."

Issues around the preservation of data related to abortion presented the worrying hypothetical in the immediate wake of Roe's overturning that a tech company might willingly, or might be forced to, provide data to law enforcement that would result in criminal charges. These companies have largely left that question unanswered. But a version of this grim scenario has already occurred, with Facebook messages provided to cops becoming key evidence in an abortion case that's being prosecuted in Nebraska. (Meta, Facebook's parent company, contends the warrants were received prior to the Supreme Court's decision and did not mention abortion specifically. Regardless, it bodes poorly for data privacy.)

Among other dystopian schemes that have already come to pass: Google's own alleged complicity in pushing fake "abortion clinic" results to care-seekers on its Search and Maps products— something this petition also seeks to redress. A variety of recent reports have pointed out that queries on these products often push users toward so-called "crisis pregnancy centers," which are non-medical, often religious establishments with the express goal of convincing pregnant people to carry their pregnancies to term.

In order to accomplish these and the other wide-ranging goals in the petition, the signatories "call on Alphabet to create a dedicated task-force with 50% employee representation, responsible for implementing changes across all products and our company, just like Alphabet did for handling the COVID-19 pandemic." The existence of that task force may not be familiar to the public. But Beatty says the volunteer team — which she believes numbered in the thousands — resulted in many recognizable changes to Alphabet products, like informational boxes about COVID on Search, testing locations being catalogued on Maps and even Google and Apple's joint contact tracing app (though granted the latter was not a resounding success). "I want to see a plan that is similar to our response to COVID-19," Beatty said. "This is a healthcare crisis that has been created. I want to see a plan like that. And others agree with me."