Dear Meteor readers,

It’s the day before, the day before the weekend, which means it is a good day!

We’ve seen stories about how our personal data can be used against us in post-Roe America, but it’s all a little confusing. In today’s newsletter, writer and security nerd Shamira Ibrahim explains how it happens and why we should care. There is a good chance you will finally delete those apps.

But first, the news, some of which is actually quite entertaining.

Turning off all location services,

Shannon Melero

WHAT’S GOING ON

TV rules: While states, companies, schools, and pretty much everyone else living in a state that has banned abortion are in a free-for-all scrambling to figure out how the overturn of Roe applies to them—TV industry workers have questions of their own. Two weeks ago, nearly 1000 TV creators and writers signed a letter to major production studios asking them to “establish clear health and safety policies for employees in anti-abortion states.” Wednesday, Vulture reported that an additional 400 directors have sent their own letter in support of their colleagues demanding “safe, subsidized reproductive health-care access.” According to The Hollywood Reporter,  several networks and studios submitted a joint response clarifying that some insurance partners are adding coverage amendments in states where abortion has been restricted. The studios have been in contact with workers affected by any policy changes. Great! Now, I don’t have to cancel all my subscriptions. (Yet.)

Where do babies come from? This week a man named Dave Alvord of the Salt Lake City Council wrote in a tweet to Kamala Harris that a fetus is not connected to a woman’s body because “the umbilical cord and placenta do not directly connect to the woman. The baby floats inside the woman.” Usually, when I hear things this nonsensical and hysterical I throw myself on the floor and have a good laugh but as there’s a fetus currently just floating around loose somewhere in my innards—utterly disconnected from me, its life source—so I guess I’ll just wait until it crawls out of its own volition before I move around too much. Perhaps the people that make laws about our bodies should have a basic understanding of how they work.

  AND:

• Naomi Osaka has withdrawn from the National Bank Open due to a back injury. It’s unclear whether she’ll be at full health in time for the U.S. Open, which begins later this month.

• According to the trend gawds at the New York Times, some folks are rebelling these days by embracing Catholicism. Don’t get me wrong, I love Catholics (they’ve got all the good stolen art). But if you really want to rebel, “try Islam, sweetie.”

• For the last time: Leave Britney alone!

• The must-read of the week: “How People Get Caught for Self Managed Abortions—and Who Tips Off the Police.” The most shocking part? Patients who were investigated by police received tips on who to look into from healthcare providers.

•  The Meteor is excited to announce we’re developing a podcast with abortion rights activist Renee Bracey Sherman and journalist Regina Mahone. Thanks to the Pop Culture Collaborative, this podcast will investigate the ongoing implications of the overturn of Roe and how we move forward from here.

• Beto O’Rourke wasted zero minutes checking a heckler who laughed while he talking about the massacre in Uvalde, Texas. Don’t mess with Beto “Knuck If You Buck” O’Rourke.

HIGH TECH

How Our Data Is Used Against Us In the Post-Roe World

It’ll take more than deleting an app to protect the privacy of our personal decisions.

BY SHAMIRA IBRAHIM

FOR DATA BROKERS, WE’RE ALL JUST NUMBERS ON A SHEET (ILLUSTRATION VIA GETTY IMAGES) 

This week, a Nebraska teenager and her mother were charged with several felonies for allegedly purchasing an abortion pill and attempting to dispose of the fetus. The police arrested them after accessing the teen’s private Facebook messages where they allegedly discussed their plan. Nebraska PD obtained the messages through a search warrant to Meta (the parent company of Facebook) as part of an ongoing investigation.

It has been almost two months since Roe v. Wade was overturned, which protected abortion as a constitutional right via the Fourteenth Amendment. An unforeseen but deeply troubling fallout from the decision is the potential misuse of our online data to enforce state-level abortion bans. It’s not an entirely new phenomenon: a recent report from the Washington Post found that there have been more than 60 cases since the turn of the century involving individuals being investigated, arrested, or charged for allegedly ending their own pregnancy or assisting someone in doing so. And, “a number of those cases have hinged on text messages, search history and other forms of digital evidence.”

How your data is captured

Our data is regularly collected online—often in ways we don’t realize. You know when you click on a website, you get a notification that states “by using this website, you agree to our use of cookies”? Those “cookies” capture information that advertisers and tech companies can use to track and monitor your activity to know your every move, your tastes, your choices, your purchases, and even your menstrual cycle. Companies often use that information to target you for ads and other types of content that they predict might be relevant to your interests.

While most sites have “cookie consent banners,” prompting users to either opt-in or out of being tracked, they are intentionally confusing: How many times do you just “accept all cookies” so you can keep it moving?

That information isn’t just used to upsell you overpriced facial creams—it can also be used to track your interest in abortion. Recently, it was revealed by the Washington Post that the landing page for scheduling an abortion on the Planned Parenthood website itself cached a number of personal attributes that could potentially be subpoenaed or shared with third-party vendors including users’ IP addresses, ZIP codes, and selected method of abortion, amongst other private information.

And that’s just if you are using your computer. Mobile phones often share real-time location data captured through apps you may inadvertently have running in the background. Deleting your period app and requesting that the companies remove your personal data is one strategy to ensure personal security. Still, surveillance that could be used to track your reproductive health goes well beyond that. If not set up properly, other apps like Instagram or Peloton can still track your location. Tracking mobile devices that come within a reasonable radius of a location, a practice known as “geofencing,” is a common tactic to find where someone has been; The New York Times did this in 2019 and identified multiple public figures without much effort.

Your data is always on sale 

AT LEAST SOMEONE’S LOOKING OUT FOR THE LITTLE GUYS. (IMAGE BY PETER DASILVA VIA GETTY IMAGES)

In July, Gizmodo tech reporters Shoshana Wodinsky and Kyle Barr found an astounding number of companies already selling personal data to anyone with a checkbook. They report identifying “32 different brokers across the U.S. selling access to the unique mobile IDs from some 2.9 billion profiles of people pegged as ‘actively pregnant’ or ‘shopping for maternity products.’” And, “data on 478 million customer profiles labeled “interested in pregnancy” or “intending to become pregnant.’”

It wouldn’t be such a concern if these companies were just in bed with retailers but some contract with law enforcement agencies. Data broker Venntel counts ICE among their client roster to share location data, which can be used to initiate deportation processes. As Bennett Cyphers, a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation explained in the same Gizmodo piece, data brokers’ publicly available tools are “a big risk” for abortion seekers. These companies “label people and put people into lists that make it easier for someone who is coming at it like a fishing expedition to narrow down who they want to target and subject them to more scrutiny or surveillance.”

As far back as 2015, digital marketing company Copley Advertising used “geofencing” to hone in on “abortion-minded” women, using location data to indicate they were likely in the waiting room of an abortion provider. With that information in hand, Copley’s clients were able to target groups who would then receive banner ads with information on abortion alternatives.

Vendors such as SafeGraph have location data on Planned Parenthood offices already prepared for sale, promising their clients information such as “how often people visit, how long they stay, where they came from, where else they go, and more.” And while there is no marker to indicate if someone obtained abortion-related services or was in the area supporting someone else;  in 2018, the New York Times was able to use this data to identify someone who had used Planned Parenthood’s services.

Other ways to track information by police include facial recognition technology, social media, and even DMV records. It’s also worth noting that if a law enforcement agency provides a search warrant to a company for a particular dataset (such as in the Nebraska case) that company is compelled to turn over any information covered under the warrant—privacy be damned. These tools used collectively help law enforcement investigate and prosecute abortion-seekers and their respective networks of support.

How to limit data tracking

The solution to this threat to our privacy has to come from the federal level and reach beyond reproductive legislation to privacy laws as a whole to protect our data from exploitation. These laws should apply to both corporate entities and law enforcement authorities seeking to manipulate the for-profit data model to obtain information that is more difficult to glean from a court-ordered warrant. The European Union took a major step forward by enforcing the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation in 2018), which, while not perfect, has been able to levy significant fines against Big Tech for privacy violations.

But until a wide-reaching, federal solution becomes available, there are steps that individuals can take to minimize risk:

• If you’ve already removed your period app but still want to track your cycle, use apps that do the most possible to protect your data, such as Cycle Tracking or FEMMN, and ensure your app-specific privacy settings are set properly.

• Consider using services such as NextDNS, which can help block ads, cookies, and other trackers while browsing.

• ProtonMail offers end-to-end encryption of all communications, should you need to email a clinic for services.

• For general browsing via search engines, Duckduckgo is the standard for private browsing as an alternative to Google.

• Do regular audits of your iPhone and Android privacy settings when you can.

• When possible, refrain from sharing details about plans of protests or services on any social media attached to your email, phone number, or physical device/IP address.

• Use Signal for encrypted texts and calls as opposed to iMessage or WhatsApp.

For more thorough and frequently updated guides, bookmark the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Surveillance Self-Defense Guide and the Digital Defense Fund’s Guide to Abortion Privacy.

Be sure to share this newsletter with any of your friends struggling to figure out how to protect themselves online. 

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