How Apps Could Affect Your Privacy After the Roe v. Wade Decision

With abortion now or quickly to be unlawful in over a dozen states and severely restricted in lots of extra, Big Tech corporations that vacuum up private particulars of their customers are going through new calls to restrict that monitoring and surveillance. One worry is that regulation enforcement or vigilantes may use these information troves towards folks in search of methods to finish undesirable pregnancies.

History has repeatedly demonstrated that at any time when folks’s private information is tracked and saved, there’s all the time a threat that it could possibly be misused or abused. With the Supreme Court’s Friday overruling of the 1973 Roe v. Wade choice that legalized abortion, collected location information, textual content messages, search histories, emails and seemingly innocuous interval and ovulation-tracking apps could possibly be used to prosecute individuals who search an abortion — or medical look after a miscarriage — in addition to those that help them.

“In the digital age, this decision opens the door to law enforcement and private bounty hunters seeking vast amounts of private data from ordinary Americans,” mentioned Alexandra Reeve Givens, the president and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based digital rights nonprofit.

It’s already occurring

Until this previous May, anybody may purchase a weekly trove of knowledge on shoppers at greater than 600 Planned Parenthood websites across the nation for as little as $160 (roughly Rs. 12,630), in response to a current Vice investigation. The recordsdata included approximate affected person addresses — derived from the place their cellphones “sleep” at evening — earnings brackets, time spent on the clinic, and the highest locations folks visited earlier than and afterward.

It’s all potential as a result of federal regulation — particularly, HIPAA, the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act — protects the privateness of medical recordsdata at your physician’s workplace, however not any data that third-party apps or tech corporations gather about you. This can be true if an app that collects your information shares it with a 3rd celebration that may abuse it.

In 2017, a Black girl in Mississippi named Latice Fisher was charged with second-degree homicide after she sought medical look after a being pregnant loss.

“While receiving care from medical staff, she was also immediately treated with the suspicion of committing a crime,” civil rights attorney and Ford Foundation fellow Cynthia Conti-Cook wrote in her 2020 paper, “Surveilling the Digital Abortion Diary.” Fisher’s “statements to nurses, the medical information, and the post-mortem information of her fetus had been turned over to the native police to research whether or not she deliberately killed her fetus,” she wrote.

Fisher was indicted on a second-degree homicide cost in 2018; the conviction may have led to life in jail. The homicide cost was later dismissed. Evidence towards her, although included her on-line search historical past, which included queries on how you can induce a miscarriage and how you can purchase abortion drugs on-line.

“Her digital data gave prosecutors a ‘window into (her) soul’ to substantiate their general theory that she did not want the fetus to survive,” Conti-Cook wrote.

Fisher is not alone. In 2019, prosecutors presented a young Ohio mother’s browsing history during a trial in which she stood accused of killing and burying her newborn baby. Defence attorneys for Brooke Skylar Richardson, who was ultimately acquitted of murder and manslaughter charges, said the baby was stillborn.

But prosecutors argued she’d killed her daughter, pointing in part to Richardson’s internet search history, which included a query for “how to get rid of a baby.” She was later acquitted.

Industry response

Technology companies have by and large tried to sidestep the issue of abortion where their users are concerned. They haven’t said how they might cooperate with law enforcement or government agencies trying to prosecute people seeking an abortion where it is illegal — or who are helping someone do so.

Last week, four Democratic lawmakers asked federal regulators to investigate Apple and Google for allegedly deceiving millions of mobile phone users by enabling the collection and sale of their personal data to third parties.

“Individuals seeking abortions and other reproductive healthcare will become particularly vulnerable to privacy harms, including through the collection and sharing of their location data,” the lawmakers said in the letter. “Data brokers are already selling, licensing and sharing the location information of people that visit abortion providers to anyone with a credit card.”

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

Governments and law enforcement can subpoena companies for data on their users. Generally, Big Tech policies suggest the companies will comply with abortion-related data requests unless they see them as overly broad. Meta, for instance, pointed to its online transparency report, which says “we comply with government requests for user information only where we have a good-faith belief that the law requires us to do so.”

Online rights advocates say that’s not enough.

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

What about period apps?

After Friday’s Supreme Court ruling, some period-tracking apps tried to assure users that their data was safe. But it helps to read the fine print of the apps’ privacy policies.

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

Clue, which also has a period tracking app, said it keeps users’ health data — particularly related to pregnancies, pregnancy loss or abortion — “private and safe” with data encryption. It also said it uses auditing software for regulatory compliance 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 those purposes, it said, “we share as little data as possible in the safest way possible.” But Clue offered no further details.

Burden on the User

Unless all of your data is securely encrypted, there’s always a chance that someone, somewhere can access it. So abortion rights activists suggest that people in states where abortion is outlawed should limit the creation of such data in the first place.

For instance, they urge turning off phone location services — or just leaving your phone at home — when seeking reproductive health care. To be safe, they say, it’s good to read the privacy policies of any health apps in use.

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

There are also ways to turn off ad identifiers on both Apple and Android phones that stop advertisers from being able to track you. This is generally a good idea in any case. Apple will ask you if you want to be tracked each time you download a new app. For apps you already have, the tracking can be turned off manually.