With Roe in doubt, some fear tech surveillance of pregnancy
PHILADELPHIA » 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 graduated 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.
Online searches. Period apps. Fitness trackers. Advice helplines. GPS. Often obscure companies collect our health history and geolocation data.
The information is mostly used to sell things, including baby products targeted to pregnant women.
But in a post-Roe world, if the Supreme Court upends the 1973 decision that legalized abortion, as a draft opinion suggests it may in the coming weeks, the data would become more valuable, and women more vulnerable.
Privacy experts fear that pregnancies could be surveilled and the data shared with police or sold to 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 lawyer and technology fellow at the Ford Foundation. “It gives (them) the mental chatter inside our heads.”
When we leave home, location apps, security cameras, license-plate readers and facial-recognition software track our movements. The development of these tech tools has raced far ahead of the laws and regulations that might govern them.
The same tactics used to surveil pregnancies can be used by life insurance companies to set premiums, banks to approve loans, and employers to weigh hiring decisions, experts said.
Women who experience miscarriages are sometimes sent cheery ads on their would-be child’s birthday.
HIPAA, the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, protects medical files at doctors’ office but not the information that third-party apps and tech companies collect. Nor does HIPAA cover the health histories collected by non-medical “crisis pregnancy centers, “which are run by pro-life groups. That means the information can be shared with, or sold to, almost anyone.
Jones contacted one such facility early in her Google search, before figuring out it did not offer abortions.
“The dangers of unfettered access to Americans’ personal data have never been more clear. Researching birth control online, updating a period-tracking app or bringing a phone to the doctor’s office could be used to track and prosecute women across the U.S.,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said last week.