April 2017, Latice Fisher, a Mississippi woman, arrived at a hospital with a miscarriage. She was later charged with second-degree murder. Prosecutors used her search history and her online purchase of the abortifacient drug misoprostol as evidence to allege that she killed her fetus.
After Politico released a majority opinion draft of the US Supreme Court to strike down Roe v. Wade on Monday, activists, academics and lawyers who spoke with WIRED say they are concerned that cases like Fisher’s are becoming more common and that tech companies are not ready for the choices they will make in a post-Roe America.
“What we do know is what we’ve already seen [law enforcement] do before the criminal court,” said Cynthia Conti Cook, a trial attorney and tech fellow at the Ford Foundation who has researched the use of surveillance technology to criminalize abortion. “We don’t need to put on tinfoil hats to speculate.”
Some major tech companies, including Salesforce and Amazon, have responded to increasing abortion restrictions by supporting workers who want to relocate or reimburse workers who leave the state for medical care. But questions remain about whether they will share user data with law enforcement or continue to allow abortion-related content to remain on their platforms.
“They’re not remotely prepared for what’s to come,” said Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.
Most major tech companies, especially Google, Meta and Amazon, which rely on advertising revenue, say they don’t sell user data. But the fact that they collect and store so much information about their users makes them natural targets for law enforcement officers looking to build a case.
Earlier this week, Motherboard reported that it was able to purchase the location data of people who had visited abortion clinics from a data broker on the open market. This kind of information, says Jolynn Dellinger, a lecturer at Duke Law School who specializes in data ethics, could be used by law enforcement to pinpoint probable cause — enough to help a company like Google or Meta. requesting a user’s data or search history.
“The easiest way for companies to fail to comply with legal requests for data is to not retain and store user data,” said Fox Cahn, noting that Google has received an increasing number of requests for geofence orders, affecting all users. in a particular place at a particular time. In 2020, 25 percent of the requests Google received from US authorities were warrants for geofenced data.
Although Cooper Quintin, a researcher with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, says companies have resisted subpoenas they believe are illegal, a Bloomberg report last month found that Apple, Meta, Alphabet and Twitter were among a number of companies that had responded. to fraudulent legal requests for user data that were then used to harass and extort women and underage users.
