We all know that our whereabouts can be easily tracked on our cell phones, and that the data can then be sold. But, according to Vice, there’s a company that also tracks visits you make to a health care clinic—including those that provide abortion care.
Being tracked is frightening enough, but all of this becomes even more terrifying after a draft opinion from Supreme Court Justice Alito leaked to Politico indicating that the Court may very well overturn Roe v. Wade, which would remove federal abortion protections and ban or partially ban abortion in at least 13 U.S. states.
Gathering this data could be a very effective tool for anti-abortion rights activists who’ve had health care clinics, providers, and pro-choice organizations in their crosshairs for decades. But giving them the option to simply purchase this information from companies is a scary reality.
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Zach Edwards, a cybersecurity researcher who closely tracks data selling, says, “It's bonkers dangerous to have abortion clinics and then let someone buy the census tracks where people are coming from to visit that abortion clinic… this is how you dox someone traveling across state lines for abortions—how you dox clinics providing this service.”
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SafeGraph is one such tracking company. Essentially, Safegraph gathers location data from the apps we download onto our phones. The apps come with an unseen code and that code sends our location to companies to sell for a fee. Vice reports that SafeGraph recently sold $420,000 worth of data to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) to help them track how well COVID-19 lockdown measures were working.
“SafeGraph’s Patterns dataset includes visitor and demographic aggregations for points of interest (POIs) in the US. This contains aggregated raw counts of visits to POIs from a panel of mobile devices, answering how often people visit, how long they stay, where they came from, where else they go, and more,” according to the SafeGraph website.
Vice reports the data costs around $160 for a week’s worth of information, and “Planned Parenthood” is considered a “brand” that can be tracked.
“SafeGraph is going to be the weapon of choice for anti-choice radicals attempting to target ‘out of state clinics’ providing medical care,” Edwards said.
As Mother Jones reports, anti-choice groups have long had a serious surveillance game. Documenting who comes and goes from abortion clinics, maintaining databases, and tracking license plate numbers of patients and providers. Now, add some high-tech data tracking, and you’re able to follow people, even if they cross state lines into states where abortions are available.
As we reported in September of 2021, since SB 8 went into effect in Texas, banning almost all abortions in the state, pregnant Texans began driving from places as far south as Galveston or Corpus Christi to seek abortions in Oklahoma and Kansas.
“It’s not good,” Communication Director Zack Gingrich-Gaylord of the Trust Women Clinic in Oklahoma City told KFOR. “These are patients who would otherwise be going to seek care in their own communities. The surrounding states are not that big and they don’t have that many clinics. So it’s creating a significant strain on the neighboring states to Texas.”