The Rise of Digital Dangers Post-Roe
Anti-abortion activists are buying & tracking your location
Earlier this week, a Senate investigation revealed that an extremist anti-abortion group used location data to target people who visited 600 Planned Parenthood clinics in 48 states with misinformation. One expert told POLITICO it was the largest anti-abortion ad campaign using purchased data to date. (In 2020, just in Wisconsin alone, they delivered 14.3 million ads to people who visited abortion clinics.)
The broader concern, obviously, is that data like this—which was obtained without users’ consent—could be used in anti-choice states to prosecute abortion patients and anyone who helps them. From Sen. Ron Wyden, who launched the investigation:
“If a data broker could track Americans’ cell phones to help extremists target misinformation to people at hundreds of Planned Parenthood locations across the United States, a right-wing prosecutor could use that same information to put women in jail. Federal watchdogs should hold the data broker accountable for abusing Americans’ private information. And Congress needs to step up as soon as possible to ensure extremist politicians can’t buy this kind of sensitive data without a warrant.”
Sen. Wyden took up the investigation after the Wall Street Journal covered the Veritas Society’s strategy in an article last May. What his office found, though, showed that the campaign was much larger than originally reported.
Not only did the Veritas Society purchase cell phone location data to obtain patient info from hundreds of Planned Parenthood clinics across the country—targeting them with social media ads about abortion ‘reversal’ and other nonsense—the data company who sold the information was also investigated for peddling geolocation data to government agencies. (Terrifying.)
What’s more, the data brokerage company, Near, is going through bankruptcy; they’re selling the business and its assets. As such, Sen. Wyden is asking the Federal Trade Commission to ensure that all of Near’s data isn’t sold off, but destroyed.
Pro-choice states have been passing laws to prevent this type of data collection for just this reason—the anti-abortion movement will do anything to target women they think might end their pregnancies. Remember this huge network of anti-abortion centers that collected data on any woman who visited their website? Or how Senate Republicans wanted to create a government website that would collect data on pregnant women?
We’ve already seen how digital data can be used by law enforcement to criminalize abortion and pregnancy. A teenager jailed in Nebraska for self-managing an abortion, for example, was arrested after police read her Facebook messages. And when an Idaho teen was taken out of state for an abortion by her boyfriend and his mother, the pair were arrested after police used geolocation data to place the girl at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Oregon.
The truth is that there’s all sorts of data that could be used by anti-choice states to prosecute abortion patients and the people who help them. A report put out this summer by STOP (Surveillance Technology Oversight Project), for example, raised the alarm on automated license plate readers (ALPR), street camera footage, and the data within cars themselves—which are retained for long periods of time and can be accessible without a warrant.
Then there are period and pregnancy tracking apps—most of which collect and sell data. Mozilla researcher Jen Caltrider told The Guardian in 2022, “Most of these apps share data with a large number of third parties, and that includes everyone from advertisers and Facebook to research partners and law enforcement.”
What’s just as disturbing is that large companies and agencies—places that absolutely know better—are also falling short when protecting people’s privacy. Google, for example, is still not deleting user location data for abortion clinic visits despite repeated promises to do so. (Accountable Tech and the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission over the privacy breaches.)
Even in states like California, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and the ACLU found that police agencies were sharing automated license plate reader data with anti-choice states, despite a rule prohibiting them from doing so.
All of this aligns with how Republicans are working to access women’s health data more broadly. Remember, it wasn’t so long ago that 19 Republican attorneys general argued that they have the right to access the records of women who leave their states for abortion care. Add that to the laws requiring doctors report women’s health conditions as abortion ‘complications’ to the state (regardless if they’re actually complications), and a plan to increase “abortion surveillance” if Trump is elected in November—and you have an absolute fucking mess.
The good news is that Americans aren’t unaware of the dangers here—and the link between data privacy and reproductive rights. An October report from the ACLU, for example, found that students in the U.S. are concerned that the surveillance technology used by their schools could identify students who are looking for abortions or birth control. Digital civil rights groups are on the case, as are Democratic legislators.
But using policies and pressure campaigns on tech companies aren’t enough. Digital safety experts continually point out that the primary way law enforcement obtains private health information is through good old fashioned means like “consent searches”—where people willingly turn over their devices or records to police. (How truly ‘willing’ someone can be when questioned by law enforcement is up for debate.)
That means we need a combination of accountability and safety measures—and that in the same way we teach digital safety, Americans capable of pregnancy must learn about their rights more broadly, and how to (not) talk to cops.
To learn more about how to protect yourself online, check out guides from the Digital Defense Fund, the Washington Post, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and Asian Americans Advancing Justice.
Just wanted to share—while visiting my daughter in Arizona, I went with her while she collected signatures for the ballot initiative to protect abortion access there (just want to be very clear—she collected the signatures, I kept her company—even though it is legal, out of an abundance of caution, the campaign does not want any signature collectors who are not Arizona residents). We got a page of signatures in about 45 minutes—folks are anxious to sign! The “nos” we got were polite. Because we were in a snowbird community, we had a lot of folks, mostly older, who were registered to vote in another (colder) state, but cheered us on and said they wished they could sign. So consider this my One Good Thing for this week.
I keep saying that everything old is new again. I began college in 1970. I was 17. The age of majority was 21 then, not 18. Because I was a minor, the college stood "in loco parentis" to me--in other words they were sort of my legal guardians but everything--and I do mean *everything*--had to be reported to my parents. From whom I had fled when they attempted to forcibly marry me off. Who had neglected my health for *years.* Yeah, it was like being under surveillance 24/7. When I saw a doctor at the Student Health Center, she prescribed birth control pills--then illegal for minors, except if being used for non-contraceptive purposes, so I slipped under the wire there at least. The health center informed my parents, who were extremely conservative catholics. Long story short, when I came home for christmas, they threw me out of the family house like the criminal they believed me to be, into the coldest winter on record in the SF Bay Area. I practically died. This is what such surveillance, such lack of agency over my own body, did to me: it almost made me another nameless, dead teenager on the streets of San Francisco in December. That such a horror could happen to anyone else, adult or minor, gives me nightmares even now, 53 years later. If the anti-abortion nutcases have the their way, there will be more dead women, women who they will dehumanize, surveil and punish. Today they can use methods a lot easier than the surveillance I was subjected to so long ago. (Jessica, thank you so much for giving people like me a voice. Sometimes it feels like crying in the wilderness. You--and the community here--make it feel less so. I hope you get some good rest during your break!)