With Roe in doubt, is tech surveillance of pregnancy next?
With Roe in doubt, is tech surveillance of pregnancy next?
As some states are poised to make abortion illegal, data tracking could expose sensitive health information.
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Cellphones and computer searches give away information that could help track women seeking reproductive services [File: Jeff Chiu/AP Photo]
Published On 18 May 202218 May 2022
When Chandler Jones realized she was pregnant during her junior year of college, she turned to a trusted source for information and advice.Her cellphone. “I couldn’t imagine before the Internet, trying to navigate this,” said Jones, 26, who graduates Tuesday from the University of Baltimore School of Law. “I didn’t know if hospitals did abortions. I knew Planned Parenthood did abortions, but there were none near me. So I kind of just Googled.” But with each search, Jones was being surreptitiously followed – by the phone apps and browsers that track us as we click away, capturing even our most sensitive health data.
Web searches. Period apps. Fitness trackers. Advice helplines. GPS. The often obscure companies collecting our health history and geolocation data may know more about us than we know ourselves. For now, the information is mostly used to sell us things. But in a post-Roe world – if the Supreme Court soon reverses the 1973 decision that legalized abortion, as a draft opinion suggests it may – pregnancies could be surveilled and the data shared with police or sold to critics or vigilantes. “The value of these tools for law enforcement is for how they really get to peek into the soul,” said Cynthia Conti-Cook, a Ford Foundation technology fellow. “It gives the mental chatter inside our heads.”
And our digital trail only becomes clearer when we leave home, as security cameras, license plate readers and other tools track our movements. Their development has raced far ahead of the laws and regulations that might govern them.
Until this month, 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 afterwards. It is all possible because HIPAA, the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, protects medical files at your doctor’s office but not the information that third-party apps and tech companies collect about you.
The surveillance capabilities alarm people who support abortion rights and fear what is to come if Roe v. Wade is overturned.
Women of colour like Jones, along with poor women and immigrants, could face the most dire consequences if Roe falls, since they typically have less power and money to cover their tracks. They also tend to have more abortions, proportionally, perhaps because they have less access to health care, birth control and, in conservative states, schools with good sex education programs.
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Chandler Jones consulted the internet on her cellphone for information and advice before having an abortion during her junior year in college [Steve Ruark/AP Photo
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/5/18/with-roe-in-doubt-is-tech-surveillance-of-pregnancy-next