![]() And in 2017, prosecutors relied on a search extracted from a woman’s phone about buying abortion pills online to charge her with the murder of her stillborn fetus. Some of advocates’ fears have already been realized: Earlier this week, Motherboard reported that data broker SafeGuard was selling aggregated location data about people who visited Planned Parenthood locations. Law enforcement officials already have access to reams of data about people through traffic cameras, facial recognition cameras placed in public places and the aggregated mobile phone data they can buy from third-party data brokers.Ī s I reported for Pros in our Morning Cybersecurity newsletter this morning, digital surveillance experts are warning that this seemingly innocuous data could now be weaponized against anyone traveling to an abortion clinic, buying abortion pills online and even just searching for more information about advocacy work with abortion rights groups. ![]() “It’s not just about those who are seeking abortion care - it’s anyone who is afraid with being wrongly charged with having an abortion simply for having a miscarriage,” Cahn said. But there are now a wide variety of apps, from period trackers to heart-rate monitors, that contain huge amounts of information about your body but aren’t protected as medical records. Healthcare data shared with providers through their office’s telemedicine apps or online patient portals are all protected under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA. “We’re going to see all of the tools that are being developed as a way to optimize our healthcare now being repurposed into some sort of ‘Handmaid’s Tale’-style tracking device,” Fox said. With some states likely to outlaw most abortions, and prosecutors getting more sophisticated about how they use digital tools, could people’s personal health decisions become subject to state-level surveillance?Īlbert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, told me he’s freaked out. Wade is overturned has triggered a fresh wave of anxiety about government use of personal data. Now, the prospect of a world where Roe v. Digital surveillance experts were already stressed enough about law enforcement’s use of facial recognition tools and large troves of data from license plate scanners, biometric databases and phone location tracking services.
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