Plane Towing Protest Banner Tries to Crash Google I/O

If you tuned into Google I/O today, you may have heard a noise during the opening keynote. That’s because a plane repeatedly flew over the event towing a protest banner. 

Once Google CEO Sundar Pichai took the stage at 10 a.m. PST, the plane’s engine noise buzzed overhead, and was impossible to ignore if you were in attendance at the Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, Califorinia.

Tweet(Opens in a new window)

The banner itself read “Protect Abortion Privacy” and directed onlookers to visit heygoogle.info. It came from Accountable Tech, a nonprofit that’s focused on reining in “big tech” over policies and practices the group argues can be detrimental to democracy. Today’s protest focused on Google allegedly storing location data about visits to abortion clinics despite promises to delete it.

Last year, the company announced it would automatically delete visits to abortion clinics from people’s location history to protect user privacy following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. However, Accountable Tech’s own study(Opens in a new window) found the company can fail to completely wipe abortion-related data from a user’s Google account. 

“A search for a reproductive care facility could be used to prosecute those seeking reproductive care in states that have banned abortions,” the nonprofit said. “This experiment revealed that location search queries for a Planned Parenthood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, were collected and retained by Google for at least two months after they were generated. Google’s default privacy settings store these entries for 18 months.”  

Tweet(Opens in a new window)

The privacy concerns were enough to cause Accountable Tech to hire a plane to tow the protest banner over Google’s major event on Wednesday. The stunt appears to have worked since numerous media outlets, including PCMag, couldn’t help but tweet out images and video of the plane flying overhead. The plane made numerous passes over the event venue for about an hour, before finally flying away.   

Google didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment. But the company is adding a new feature to Google Maps that can delete recent searches within the app using a mere tap, instead of requiring the user to go through several steps in their account.