State governments looking to protect health-related data as it’s used in abortion battle

State governments across the U.S. are adopting or considering laws that would block the sale of personal health data or information about who visits sensitive sites such as sexual health facilities

By GEOFF MULVIHILL, Associated Press
February 16, 2024

Some state governments and federal regulators were already moving to keep individuals' reproductive health information private when a U.S. senator’s report last week offered a new jolt, describing how cellphone location data was used to send millions of anti-abortion ads to people who visited Planned Parenthood offices.

Federal law bars medical providers from sharing health data without a patient’s consent but doesn’t prevent digital tech companies from tracking menstrual cycles or an individual’s location and selling it to data brokers. Legislation for federal bans have never gained momentum, largely because of opposition from the tech industry.

Continued: https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/state-governments-protect-health-related-data-abortion-battle-107313291


The abortion bot will see you now

A team of abortion advocates is launching an automated abortion finder. Here’s what you need to know.

By Tatum Hunter
September 15, 2023

For abortion seekers, deciding whom to trust is important. Now there’s an online chatbot that purports to help.

Starting this week, an abortion bot called Charley from the team behind major abortion organizations including IneedanA and Plan C is rolling out across the United States — even in states with abortion bans — to help people find accessible health care. Users answer a series of questions such as the date of their last period, their Zip code and the type of procedure they’re looking for. Along the way, the bot points them toward vetted clinics, telehealth providers or support resources.

But the bot is launching into a complicated landscape for both abortion and health-care technology.

Continued: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/09/15/abortion-chatbot/


Here’s How Companies Can Protect the Privacy of People Providing or Seeking Abortion Care

6/6/2023
by JENNIFER WEISS-WOLF and ALEXANDRA REEVE GIVENS

In the immediate aftermath of the Supreme Court’s leaked decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, a wave of dystopian warnings flooded the internet. Women were urged to erase their digital footprints, delete period tracking apps, and communicate in code. A year later, myriad of digital communications have been used to fuel abortion-related prosecutions and lawsuits—from mother-daughter exchanges on Facebook to private text messages among friends.

The Center of Democracy & Technology (CDT) released a set of best practices last week for companies to adopt in order to better protect the privacy and safety of people seeking, providing or otherwise supporting abortion care.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2023/06/06/reproductive-health-data-abortion-search-online/


Miles Apart: Texas and California Lawmakers Stake Opposite Corners of Abortion Policy

It’s about 1,500 miles from Austin to Sacramento, but Texas and California lawmakers are a million miles apart on how to treat private data related to reproductive health.

5/5/2023
by JENNIFER PINSOF and HAYLEY TSUKAYAMA

State lawmakers in Texas and California are staking out opposite corners of digital public policy in the post-Roe era: in Texas by trying to ban online speech about abortion, and in California by trying to protect those seeking abortions from dragnet-style digital surveillance.

How these states legislate reproductive data privacy and information access could affect millions of vulnerable people nationwide, because the internet doesn’t stop at state borders.

Continued: https://msmagazine.com/2023/05/05/texas-california-abortion-privacy/


Facebook and Google are handing over user data to help police prosecute abortion seekers

KATHERINE TANGALAKIS-LIPPERT
MAR 5, 2023

As abortion bans across the nation are implemented and enforced, law enforcement is turning to social media platforms to build cases to prosecute women seeking abortions or abortion-inducing medication – and online platforms like Google and Facebook are helping.

This spring, a woman named Jessica Burgess and her daughter will stand trial in Nebraska for performing an illegal abortion — with a key piece of evidence provided by Meta, the parent company of Facebook. Burgess allegedly helped her daughter find and take pills that would induce an abortion. The teenage Burgess also faces charges for allegedly illegally disposing of the fetus' remains.

Continued: https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/facebook-and-google-are-handing-over-user-data-to-help-police-prosecute-abortion-seekers/articleshow/98423158.cms


USA – Human Rights Watch Letter Concerning the Use of Federal Aid in Abortion Surveillance

Letter Concerning the Use of Federal Aid in Abortion Surveillance

Human Rights Watch
December 8, 2022

Dear President Biden, We the undersigned civil and human rights, civil liberties, and reproductive health, rights, and justice organizations write to express our concern that existing forms of federal assistance to state and local law enforcement will be used to support state and local surveillance and investigations of reproductive health activities. We urge you to take steps to prevent this.

Your Administration has expressed its strong commitment to protecting access to reproductive health care, including abortion, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization. The White House has declared that it is “committed to doing everything in his power to defend reproductive rights and protect access to safe and legal abortion.”[1] As part of its effort to defend access to abortion and other reproductive health care, federal resources should in no way aid or supplement states' criminal investigations of reproductive health decisions. Several states have already taken action to prevent their own state resources from being used in such a matter.[2]

Continued: https://www.hrw.org/news/2022/12/08/letter-concerning-use-federal-aid-abortion-surveillance


How Period-Tracking Apps Can Be Weaponized by Pro-Life Advocates

With Roe v. Wade overturned in the US, menstruation apps have become a new concern in the fight for abortion rights. Do they pose the same risk in Canada?

BY ELISABETH DE MARIAFFI
Dec. 5, 2022

ON MAY 2, a draft opinion of the US Supreme Court’s decision to strike down Roe v. Wade—thus permitting states to outlaw abortion—was leaked. Social media immediately filled with posts about the impact of this new reality. These concerns included the safety of our digital data.

Users who had downloaded period-tracking apps on their phones were urged to delete them. The most popular of these apps—Flo, based in the UK, and Clue, created in Berlin—are free to download and track not only your next period but also your most fertile days of the month. In fact, depending on the information entered, the apps can predict the intensity of your menstrual flow, even your specific PMS symptoms. The fear is that such apps can also reveal when you’ve missed a period—effectively pointing to a possible pregnancy. In a post-Roe world, app users were worried their personal cycle information could be used to prosecute them. This fear is based in fact. Even before Roe was overturned, browser history was vulnerable to investigation. When, in 2017, a Mississippi woman experienced an almost-full-term stillbirth at home, prosecutors used the search history on her phone as part of their pregnancy termination case against her—and a grand jury indicted her for second-degree murder. (The case was dropped three years later.)

Continued: https://thewalrus.ca/how-period-tracking-apps-can-be-weaponized-in-the-fight-against-abortion/


USA – Googling abortion? Your details aren’t as private as you think

Johana Bhuiyan in New York
Tue 29 Nov 2022

In the wake of the US supreme court’s overturning of Roe v Wade, Google pledged fresh policies to protect people’s abortion-related data. But new research has shown the way our location and other personal data is stored remains largely unchanged, raising fears that intimate details of a person’s abortion search could be used to penalize them.

Google responds to tens of thousands of requests each year from law enforcement agencies seeking access to the vast troves of data collected on its users. In one six-month period in 2021, the most recent data publicly available, Google received nearly 47,000 law enforcement requests, affecting more than 100,000 accounts, and responded with some amount of data to 80% of them. The Dobbs decision sparked concerns that such data could be used to prosecute people seeking abortions in states where it is banned – for instance, if they searched for or traveled to an abortion clinic.

Continued: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/29/abortion-rights-us-google-roe-dobbs


There’s a new surveillance state – and women are the target

Period tracking apps, car licence plate data and pregnancy registers are the latest tools experts warn are being harnessed to monitor women

By Harriet Barber,  GLOBAL HEALTH REPORTER
7 October 2022

Surveillance data and technology are being exploited to stoke fear and prevent abortions in countries including the United States, China, Hungary and Poland.

Period tracking apps, car licence plate data and pregnancy registers are the latest tools activists warn are being harnessed to stop women using legal or geographic loopholes for terminations. All four countries have reversed abortion rights over the past two years.

Continued: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/global-health/women-and-girls/new-abortion-surveillance-state-keeping-tabs-women/


Nebraska – Facebook gave police their private data. Now, this duo face abortion charges

Experts say it underscores the importance of encryption and minimizing the amount of user data tech companies can store
Johana Bhuiyan
Wed 10 Aug 2022

In the wake of the supreme court’s upheaval of Roe v Wade, tech workers and privacy advocates expressed concerns about how the user data tech companies stored could be used against people seeking abortions.

When a Facebook staffer posed the dilemma to the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, asking how the platform would protect the user data of individuals seeking abortion care, Zuckerberg said the company’s ongoing push to encrypt messaging would help protect people from “bad behavior or over-broad requests for information”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/10/facebook-user-data-abortion-nebraska-police