Chicago police raided a high rise apartment where the Jane Collective provided abortions in May 1972. It was the year before the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision gave women the constitutional right to decide whether to give birth, and abortion was a criminal offense in Illinois.
Seven women were taken into custody, including two who carried index cards with the names and addresses on them. According to a history written by a member of the collective, “The Story of Jane,” the women destroyed the cards in the police van on the way to the station, tearing them into small pieces and eating some of them. They didn’t know what the police might do with the information, so they got rid of it.
The Roe decision was overturned by the Supreme Court fifty years later. In large parts of the country, abortions will be prohibited or severely limited. However, with the digital trails that technology has left behind, it will be much easier to hide incriminating information about a decision not to terminate a pregnancy.
When a draft of the court’s decision was first leaked in May, and then when the ruling became official last week, people focused on these digital trails, specifically the information that millions of women share about their menstrual cycles on period tracker apps. The simple, direct advice was to delete them all. Immediately.
“Delete those fertility apps now,” tweetedGina Neff, a sociologist and director of Minderoo Center for Technology and Democracy (University of Cambridge), spoke. In an interview over Zoom, Dr. Neff said the apps contained “powerful information about reproductive choices that’s now a threat.”
These apps allow users record their menstrual cycles, and make predictions about when they will ovulate and become fertile. These apps can be used to keep track of sexual activity, birth control methods, conception attempts, and other information. The apps can be used by some women to help them get pregnant, while others are used to help them avoid getting pregnant. Many users also use the apps to track when their next period will occur.
They seem to have had the opposite effect to the exhortations to get rid. Data.ai monitors app store activity and found that period tracking apps downloaded twice as many in the days following Roe’s overturn. This is in contrast to the average weekly downloads for the three preceding months.
The biggest gainers were Clue and a little-known astronomy-based period tracker, Stardust, both of which made public commitments to data protection after the Supreme Court’s decision. A spokeswoman for Clue said the company, which is based in Europe, would not comply with requests for users’ health information from U.S. law enforcement.
Experts say that while period trackers may seem like a good source of information regarding reproductive health decisions, other digital information could be more dangerous for women. Cynthia Conti-Cook is a civil rights lawyer and technology Fellow at Ford Foundation. She researched the prosecutions of pregnant women accused of feticide, or endangering their foetuses. In an academic paper she published in 2020, she also compiled the digital evidence against them.
“We should start with the types of data that have already been used to criminalize people,” said Ms. Conti-Cook, who previously worked in a public defenders’ office in New York. “The text to your sister that says, ‘Expletive, I’m pregnant.’ The search history for abortion pills or the visitation of websites that have information about abortion.”
Ms. Conti Cook highlighted the case of Latice Fischer, a Mississippi woman charged with second-degree killing in 2017 after stillbirth at her home. According to a local report, investigators downloaded the contents of her phone, including her internet search history, and she “admitted to conducting internet searches, including how to induce a miscarriage” and how to buy pregnancy-terminating medicine like mifepristone and misoprostol online. The case against Ms. Fisher was dropped after significant public attention.
In Indiana, Purvi Ptel was also convicted of text messaging to a friend regarding taking abortion pills late in pregnancy. Purvi Patel appealed and was sentenced to a 20 year sentence for neglecting a dependent.
“Those text messages, those websites visited, those Google searches are the exact type of intent evidence that prosecutors want to fill their bag of evidence,” Ms. Conti-Cook said.
If states pass laws that prohibit women from traveling to places where abortion is legal, investigators could also use their smartphone location data. Information about people’s movements, collected via apps on their phones, is regularly sold by data brokers.
The New York Times found out that a woman had spent one hour at a Planned Parenthood in Newark when it examined the market data. Vice’s May reporter was able to purchase information from a broker about the phones that were taken to Planned Parenthoods in a week for $160. (After Vice’s report, the data broker said it planned to cease selling data about visits to the health provider.)
In the past, anti-abortion activists have “geofenced” Planned Parenthoods, creating a digital border around them and targeting phones that enter the area with ads directing owners to a website meant to dissuade women from ending their pregnancies.
Similar attempts are made to attract the attention people who use the internet to find help with abortions. “Pregnancy crisis centers” aim to be at the top of Google search results when people seek information about how to end a pregnancy. It may try to collect information from people who click through to such websites.
Given the many ways in which people’s movements, communications and internet searches are digitally tracked, the bigger question may be just how zealous law enforcement will be in states with abortion bans. Those who advise against period trackers fear the worst: Dragnet-style searches for anyone who was or has ceased to be pregnant.
“It’s hard to say what will happen where and how and when, but the possibilities are pretty perilous,” Ms. Conti-Cook said. “It can be very easy to be overwhelmed by all the possibilities, which is why I try to emphasize focusing on what we have seen used against people.”
She added: “Google searches, websites visited, email receipts. That’s what we’ve seen.”
Source: NY Times
