A person is silhouetted against a wall as they look down at their cell phone outside the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center on July 29, 2021, in Los Angeles.
“In the digital age, this decision opens the door to law enforcement and private bounty hunters seeking vast amounts of private data from ordinary Americans,” said Alexandra Reeve Givens, the president and CEO of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a Washington-based digital rights nonprofit.Until this past May, anyone could buy a weekly trove of data on clients at more than 600 Planned Parenthood sites around the country for as little as $160, according to a recent Vice investigation.
“While receiving care from medical staff, she was also immediately treated with suspicion of committing a crime,” civil rights attorney and Ford Foundation fellow Cynthia Conti-Cook wrote in her 2020 paper, “Surveilling the Digital Abortion Diary.” Fisher’s “statements to nurses, the medical records, and the autopsy records of her fetus were turned over to the local police to investigate whether she intentionally killed her fetus,” she wrote.
Fisher is not alone. In 2019, prosecutors presented a young Ohio mother’s browsing history during a trial in which she stood accused of killing and burying her newborn baby. Defense attorneys for Brooke Skylar Richardson, who was ultimately acquitted of murder and manslaughter charges, said the baby was stillborn.
“Individuals seeking abortions and other reproductive healthcare will become particularly vulnerable to privacy harms, including through the collection and sharing of their location data,” the lawmakers said in the letter. “Data brokers are already selling, licensing and sharing the location information of people that visit abortion providers to anyone with a credit card.”Governments and law enforcement can subpoena companies for data on their users.
📝 BarbaraOrtutay / AP.
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