Why data privacy is a concern in the wake of the Roe decision

With abortion now or sooner illegal in more than a dozen states and severely restricted in many more, Big Tech companies that collect personal data from their users are facing new calls to limit such monitoring and surveillance.

The fear that drives these calls: that law enforcement or vigilantes can use this data against people looking for ways to end unwanted pregnancies.

History has repeatedly shown that whenever people’s personal data is tracked and stored, there is always the risk of misuse or abuse. With that of the Supreme Court Friday cancellation of the decision Roe v. Wade’s 1973 legalization of abortion, collecting location data, text messages, search histories, emails, and seemingly innocuous period and ovulation tracking applications could be used to prosecute people requesting an abortion or medical attention for a miscarriage. as well as those who attend them.

“In the digital age, this decision opens the door to law enforcement and private bounty hunters looking for large amounts of private data from ordinary Americans,” said Alexandra Reeve Givens, president and CEO of Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based company. non-profit digital rights.

It’s already happening

Until last May, anyone could buy a weekly amount of customer data at more than 600 Planned Parenthood sites across the country for just $ 160, according to a recent Vice investigation. The files included approximate addresses of patients, derived from where they “slept” their cell phones at night, admission groups, time spent in the clinic, and major places people visited before and after.

Everything is possible because federal law, specifically HIPAA, the Health Insurance Liability and Portability Act of 1996, protects the privacy of medical files in your doctor’s office, but not the information that third-party applications or technology companies pick up on you. This is also true if an application that collects your data shares it with a third party who could abuse it.

In 2017, a black Mississippi woman named Latice Fisher was charged with second-degree murder after seeking medical attention for a pregnancy loss.

“While receiving medical care, she was also immediately treated on suspicion of committing a crime,” wrote civil rights lawyer and Ford Foundation colleague Cynthia Conti-Cook in her 2020 article, “Watching the Digital Diary of abortion “. “Fisher’s statements to the nurses, medical records and autopsy records of his fetus were handed over to local police to investigate whether he killed his fetus intentionally,” she wrote.

Fisher was charged with a second-degree murder charge in 2018; the sentence could have led to life imprisonment. The murder charge was later dismissed. The evidence against her, though, included her online search history, which included inquiries about how to induce a miscarriage and how to buy abortion pills online.

“His digital data gave prosecutors a‘ window to (his) soul ’to corroborate his general theory that he didn’t want the fetus to survive,” Conti-Cook wrote.

Fisher is not alone. In 2019, prosecutors presented the browsing history of a young Ohio mother during a trial in which she was accused of killing and burying her baby. Brooke Skylar Richardson’s defense attorneys, who were eventually acquitted of the charges of manslaughter and manslaughter, said the baby had been born dead.

But prosecutors argued he had killed his daughter, pointing in part to Richardson’s Internet search history, which included a consultation on “how to get rid of a baby.” She was later acquitted.

The industry is still a mother

In general, technology companies have tried to evade the issue of abortion with regard to its users. They have not said how they could cooperate with law enforcement or government agencies trying to prosecute people seeking an abortion where it is illegal, or who are helping someone do it.

Last week, four Democratic lawmakers called on federal regulators to investigate Apple and Google for allegedly misleading millions of cell phone users by allowing the collection and sale of their personal data to third parties.

“People seeking abortions and other reproductive health care will be especially vulnerable to privacy harms, even through the collection and exchange of location data,” lawmakers said in the letter. “Data brokers already sell, license, and share location information from people visiting abortion providers to anyone with a credit card.”

Apple and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Governments and law enforcement can and have cited companies for obtaining data on their users. In general, Big Tech policies suggest that companies will comply with abortion-related data requests, unless they consider them too broad. Meta, for example, noted its online transparency report, which says it “complies with government requests for user information only when we believe in good faith that the law requires us to do so.”

But online rights advocates say it’s not enough.

“In this new environment, technology companies need to step up and play a crucial role in protecting women’s digital privacy and access to information online,” said Givens, of the Center for Democracy and Technology. For example, they could strengthen and expand the use of encryption that protects privacy; limit the collection, exchange and sale of information that may reveal the state of pregnancy; and refrain from using artificial intelligence tools that can also infer which users may be pregnant.

What about vintage apps?

Following Friday’s Supreme Court ruling, some period tracking apps tried to assure users that their data was secure. But it is useful to read the fine print of the application’s privacy policies.

Flo Health, the company behind a widely used period tracking app, tweeted Friday that it would soon launch an “Anonymous Mode” aimed at removing personal identity from user accounts and pledged not to sell personal data from users. its users.

Clue, who also has a period tracking app, said she keeps users ’health data, especially related to pregnancies, pregnancy loss or abortion,“ private and secure ”with data encryption. He also said he uses audit software to comply with regulations and removes user identities before their data is analyzed by the scientific researchers the company works with.

At the same time, the company acknowledged that it employs “some carefully selected service providers to process data on our behalf.” For these purposes, he said, “we share as little data as possible in the safest way possible.” But Clue offered no further details.

The burden falls on the user

Unless all your data is encrypted securely, there is always the possibility that someone, somewhere, can access it. And even data that is said to be “anonymous” is often not. Researchers have shown that having only four credit card purchases or three locations is enough to uniquely identify the vast majority of people.

Thus, abortion rights activists suggest that people in states where abortion is banned should limit the creation of such data in the first place. For example, they urge you to turn off phone location services, or simply leave your phone at home, when looking for reproductive health care.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation suggests using more privacy-conscious web browsers such as Brave, Firefox, and DuckDuckGo, but also recommends that users check their privacy settings.

There are also ways to turn off ad IDs on both Apple and Android phones that prevent advertisers from tracking you. Overall, this is a good idea anyway. Apple will ask if you want to be tracked every time you download a new app. For applications you already have, tracking can be turned off manually.

In:
• Homicide
• Abortion
• civil rights
• Crime