I read this article today in which Google stated that it would “wipe user location history for visits to healthcare clinics, domestic violence shelters” with the following text as an example:

Suppose the company’s systems detect a visit to places including medical facilities, counseling centers, domestic violence shelters, abortion and fertility clinics, or addiction treatment centers. In that case, Fitzpatrick says, “we will delete these entries from Location History soon after they visit.”

Well done Google for making this gesture, but it is nowhere near enough as at the heart of their business model, and that of many tech companies, is the data about each of the users that it uses in its advertising business for targeting etc.

From an investigative perspective, the absence of data is just as telling, if not more so, and nowhere in the article does it state if this policy will cover everyone that uses Google or just a subsection of users?

Privacy is a fundamental right, essential to autonomy and the protection of human dignity, serving as the foundation upon which many other human rights are built.

Privacy enables us to create barriers and manage boundaries to protect ourselves from unwarranted interference in our lives, which allows us to negotiate who we are and how we want to interact with the world around us. Privacy helps us establish boundaries to limit who has access to our bodies, places and things, as well as our communications and our information.

Privacy is essential to who we are as human beings, and we make decisions about it every single day. It gives us a space to be ourselves without judgement, allows us to think freely without discrimination, and is an important element of giving us control over who knows what about us.

We have forgotten about privacy and the importance it plays in our lives and applaud companies who make gestures to giving back some of this fundamental right to us, but who will be ensuring that this happens?