Creepy Data Broker Says It Will No Longer Sell Planned Parenthood Visitors’ Location History

A knowledge location dealer firm referred to as SafeGraph says it would not promote the situation knowledge of teams of individuals visiting Planned Parenthood and different clinics that present abortions following a current Vice report. Purchasers of that knowledge beforehand might reportedly inform the place guests to these clinics got here from, how lengthy they stayed on the clinic and the place they went after.

SafeGraph on Tuesday stated it determined to reverse course partially because of information of a leaked preliminary draft majority opinion which reveals the U.S. Supreme Court’s obvious curiosity in placing down Roe v Wade, a titanic transfer that will successfully make abortion unlawful in lots of states.

“In light of potential federal changes in family planning access, we’re removing Patterns data for locations classified as NAICS code 621410 (‘Family Planning Centers’) from our self-serve “shop” and API to curtail any potential misuse of its knowledge,” SafeGraph wrote on its website.

In an interview with Gizmodo, a SafeGraph spokesperson stated the corporate made the choice based mostly partly on the “polarizing” nature of the info and in response to what he sees as “misinformation” surrounding how their knowledge can be utilized.

“We’re confident the data does not pose any privacy or security risk to individuals and have had no reports of individuals or parties using our data maliciously,” the corporate spokesperson stated. “But since this is a very polarizing and sensitive topic, it makes sense for us to proactively suspend access to our aggregated data related to family planning centers to unknown users.”

Controversy round SafeGraph’s knowledge comes as activists and lawmakers warn of the potential weaponizing of private knowledge to trace down ladies looking for abortions in a publish Roe v Wade America. Oregon Senator Ron Wyden commented on the darkish chance of anti-abortion vigilantes utilizing knowledge to hunt individuals down in a current interview with Gizmodo.

“If the Supreme Court follows through and overturns Roe, every digital record—from web searches, to phone records and app data—will be weaponized in Republican states as a way to control women’s bodies,” Wyden instructed Gizmodo. “The simple act of searching for ‘pregnancy test’ could cause a woman to be stalked, harassed and attacked.”

SafeGraph, whose funds reportedly embody Peter Thiel and a former Saudi Arabian intelligence head, aggregates knowledge it collects from cellphone apps and sells it. The firm assures customers all of its knowledge is anonymized, although privateness consultants on the Electronic Frontier Foundation and elsewhere point out it’s “trivially easy” to link that sort of knowledge with real-world identities.

Despite these considerations, SafeGraph reiterated to Gizmodo their confidence within the firm’s means to maintain knowledge nameless.

“We’ve always considered privacy our first priority and our data cannot be de-anonymized to identify individuals,” the spokesperson stated. “I can only speak for SafeGraph but we’ve never encountered anyone who has used our data to identify an individual, despite tens of thousands of the world’s best data scientists and researchers analyzing our data over the past few years. We’re confident our data protects the identity of individuals.”

There’s already proof of knowledge getting used to focus on abortion seekers. Back in 2017, a Mississippi lady was reportedly charged with second-degree homicide after prosecutors had been ready to make use of her on-line search outcomes for abortion tablets as a motive following a failed being pregnant. Two years previous to that, Indiana prosecutors used a lady’s cellphone messages round alleged on-line purchases of abortion tablets as a part of a case that resulted within the lady being discovered guilty of feticide and little one neglect.

SafeGraph expressed reservations round its choice to cease promoting abortion-related knowledge, claiming doing so could negatively influence researchers.

“Taking away this data will impact many academics that want to study this topic (like understanding the impact of legislation on family planning visits),” the corporate stated. “We acknowledge that our decision to take down Patterns for family planning centers could negatively impact this valuable research, but we think this is the right decision given the current climate.”

“Making places data convenient and accessible via self serve has the drawback that we aren’t able to fully control who buys the data,” Barry stated. “The benefit is that it allows our data to quickly get into the hands of researchers doing very important work.”