EXPLAINER: Abortion, tech and surveillance

With abortion now or soon to be illegal in over a dozen states and severely restricted in many more, Big Tech companies are facing new calls to limit tracking and surveillance

With abortion now or soon to be illegal in over a dozen states and severely restricted in many more, Big Tech companies that vacuum up personal details of their users are facing new calls to limit that tracking and surveillance. One fear is that law enforcement or vigilantes could use those data troves against people seeking ways to end unwanted pregnancies.

History has repeatedly demonstrated that whenever people’s personal data is tracked and stored, there’s always a risk that it could be misused or abused. With the Supreme Court’s Friday overruling of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion, collected location data, text messages, search histories, emails and seemingly innocuous period and ovulation-tracking apps could be used to prosecute people who seek an abortion — or medical care for a miscarriage — as well as those who assist 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,” said Alexandra Reeve Givens, the president and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based digital rights nonprofit.

Until this past May, anyone could buy a weekly trove of data on clients at more than 600 Planned Parenthood sites around the country for as little as $160, according to a recent Vice investigation. The files included approximate patient addresses — derived from where their cellphones “sleep” at night — income brackets, time spent at the clinic, and the top places people visited before and afterward.

It’s all possible because federal law — specifically, HIPAA, the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act — protects the privacy of medical files at your doctor’s office, but not any information that third-party apps or technology companies collect about you. This is also true if an app that collects your data shares it with a third party that might abuse it.

In 2017, a Black woman in Mississippi named Latice Fisher was charged with second-degree murder after she sought medical care for a pregnancy loss.

“While receiving care from medical staff, she was also immediately treated with 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 records, and the autopsy records of her fetus were turned over to the local police to investigate whether she intentionally killed her fetus,” she wrote.