Tech Companies Won't Say If They’ll Give Cops Abortion Data
vice.com
vice.com
What we should be asking them is whether they’re now doing everything they can to scrub their datasets of information that could be requested by police and could be used in abortion cases.
That sound illegal in and of itself.
By this logic no user data can ever be deleted, just in case it becomes relevant to enforcing a future law.
That's cold comfort when the AG of those minority states decide to prosecute the company or their executives.
>By this logic no user data can ever be deleted, just in case it becomes relevant to enforcing a future law.
But it's illegal in 13 states right now.
You have to define what is actually illegal and how the data would be used. Most of the laws are about performing an abortion in the state. I'm not up to date on everything, but generally state jurisdiction ends at the state line. For example, someone in CA can look up high capacity magazines and buy them in another state without ever bringing them back into CA. They can't prosecute you for touching a 30rd mag in a different state.
Fair enough, but this data should be getting deleted for users in the other 37 states right now.
Executives can move to a non-extradition state, Boston and MA have already stated they won't cooperate with extradition requests in relation to abortion prosecutions.
You might also want to consider the long term cost of being parties to a human rights violation under color of law, vs the short-term cost of not doing that.
This point is actually a big part of the original decisions regarding abortion, so the current SCOTUS might very well say yes they do
If the company operates out of California, well, state's rights and that activity isn't illegal in California and there is nothing anyone can do about it.
If the company operates out of one of the states that is making abortion illegal then yea maybe, except that states such as California or New York may make it a requirement that companies collecting such data must delete it upon request from their citizens in order to operate in that state. At which point nobody is keeping their HQ in an anti-abortion state so it probably doesn't matter because there is nobody who can enforce the law. It will just come down to jurisdiction.
But good luck to anti-abortion states in enforcing these laws and trying people for murder or something. State governments are already woefully incompetent at enforcing other laws. I personally will be donating to entities that help fund people who need help covering travel expenses for an abortion.
If they pay for your data (like other entities can and do), yes they can.
The question is whether they have enough data to provide to law enforcement if one their users underwent an abortion. If they aren't collecting enough data to determine this then they could just state: "we can't and therefor we won't"
It's a huge red flag if corps think they have enough data about their users that they think they can provide this data.
edit: I'm not talking about social media where people might explicitly say this.
We have already seen law enforcement ask for identification of users and other data of all phones in the vicinity of a crime. It's not a leap to imagine them asking for this same data using a geofence around providers and using that to obtain search history, communications, or other records
The laws differ between what law enforcement can and can't do.
https://johnfbakerlaw.com/the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly-of-g...
I was responding to this from an 'EU' perspective. For the tech companies who do bussiness globally, my objection still stands. In the country I'm living in, the data collected to determine whether someone is pregnant or had an abortion, is data collected beyond what they should be collecting to provide their service.
I have no idea why a company who provides: email, vpn, search, etc... should be able to figure out users health data.
Short of that, I don’t trust them.
Having said that, I’m not sure at all how Snapchat, etc enter into this. They are platforms where people post about themselves to the world. If I had a post saying “I am on the way to get an abortion” I am not sure how or why the company would get between me and the law.
It also means very little that Google and other companies are committing to provide out of state abortions if they are only willing to do so in a way that the insurance provider tracks and reimburses those expenses before handing them over to the state so you can be prosecuted for undergoing a medical procedure. This doesn't actually accomplish getting people safe access to abortion, it's theatre.
I never understood this argument. How are the corporations being "bailed out" in this case? The employees need sustenance regardless of whether they're employed or not. If anyone is getting "bailed out" it's the food stamp programs, because the programs are means tested and receiving income from employment reduces the amount of funds that need to be handed out.
Oh, I wish the human beings in big corporations would be handcuffed for breaking US law when they do things like tax evasion, wage theft, have unfair labor practices, etc. I in no way expect these big corporations to do anything for me out of the goodness of their own heart, as the article suggests, but let's not pretend like the law doesn't apply differently to them.
The parent post doesn't imply equal treatment under the law, only that the state can coerce the employees/executives of tech companies into complying.
[Edit] most relevant reply here from Krapp: If you're using a period tracker, you may want to consider deleting it
But this certainly brings USA one step closer to Iran and Saudi Arabia in terms of religious extremism and your individual rights as a woman.
What were you worried about looking up/messaging when those revelations came out?
I think this is a reasonable concern. But I think this is where it differs from the concern people have with sharing abortion data.
In the NSA case, the concern is in a possible future, the information they've gathered could be used against you in some way.
In the current abortion data case, the concern is:
1. That there are states with laws on the books that would punish you if this information came to light.
2. There are companies with this information in hand that have no legal obligation to keep it private.
3. These companies refuse to make any sort of agreement or promise to keep this data away from those that would use it against you, or destroy the data.
4. These companies are within the legal jurisdiction of the aforementioned states.
The threat here is much more concrete.
Edit: To be clear, I'm not saying that the mass collection of data by the NSA is harmless. Rather, I understand why people are more concerned about the abortion data collection, because the threat is more concrete. The full consequence that NSA data collection poses haven't actualized, but depending on how things go, could be much, much worse than this.
Oh, wait, I said "further than 2 feet ahead", but this is already happening. Well it can always get worse, who knows how close towards China the US will move in the next few decades. Or maybe your political stance will continue to be so totally in-line with the establishment, that even living in a state-corporate panopticon, you will have nothing to worry about. The ideal citizen of the future.
You saw the cage closing in around you, but thought "Why should I worry? I'm on good terms with the warden."
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/china-spent-years-coll...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Chokepoint
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ahead-far-right-wing-ra...
[4] https://www.foxnews.com/travel/airbnb-bans-white-supremacist...
[5] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/18/us/politics/military-capi...
I'm also not sure what you mean by "extra-legally" in this context. "Extralegal" means not regulated or sanctioned by law. AirBnB banning people from its platform is certainly regulated - for example, you can't ban based on protected classes (of which being a white nationalist is not). Governmental hiring, military admissions, etc. are all clearly very regulated environments.
What does operation Chokepoint or Chinese hacking have to do with white nationalism? And don't worry, they'll define every opinion they want to suppress as "antithetical to a free American society" - anti-immigration becomes white supremacy, anti-war becomes Muslim extremism/support of dictators, anti-factory-farming becomes eco-terrorism [1],...
> conflating actions taken by the government and operations taken by private companies
I'm not conflating anything. I'm listing the risks of surveillance - they are present in both the corporate and governmental spheres, not limited to only one or the other.
[1] Supporters of ag-gag laws have argued that they serve to protect the agriculture industry from the negative repercussions of exposés by whistle blowers. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ag-gag
I know what you're doing in the bathroom, but you still close the door.
It's the first time in, well, a long long time, that an average person might have something to hide, simply for the crime of being female.
I'm struggling to think of a law that had the same effect on as many people as before.
Because things that are not procured abortions were not protected by Roe even when it was in place, places with fetal homicide laws while Roe was in place have, in fact, investigated and, though far less often, sometimes charged miscarriages/stillbirths as homicides, usually of types involving recklessness or criminal negligence, not intent-to-kill.
End to end encryption doesn't matter if the ends are p3wned.
Oh wait - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
There could be multiple ways to interpret complying with requests for information, especially since there's nothing specific to abortion information in cutrent law and no case law to look at. Why would a company provide a statement around a poorly defined hypothetical?
Corporate morality rarely extends beyond its value as PR. Once the financial cost of doing the right thing exceeds the PR value, it's probable that the financial considerations will prevail.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_World_War_II#Critics_o...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-apple-icloud-insigh...
Make that the morality of most individuals. Few people in the world are bleeding hearts. Most will pay lip service to a cause and then go back to work on Monday to pay taxes to the very government they condemned as oppressive. If every Tom, Dick, and Harry are each fickle enough to preserve themselves when their livelihoods and investments become threatened, why expect a group of them under the banner of ABC, inc. to be any more self-sacrificial?
Money interprets ethics as damage and routes around it.
The US has a very disfunctional political system. But that doesn't mean it's viable to just try and shame big companies into overriding the law...
The current one, on the other hand, might work great for the FBI. In 1868, Vigenère was considered unbreakable. If it was good enough then...
Sounds kinda tyrannical
Welcome to the sting all the "crazies" in the anti-data hoovering camp were on about. Geofence warrants around known abortion clinics, financial purchase/search query surveillance, you name it. If a State Attorney General decides it's worth pursuing, I guarantee the datasets that have been hoovered are more than enough to spill the beans on anyone.
This is why data, in particular geospatial location history data, is toxic as all hell just by existing.
Curious how well those companies, purely staffed with right-wing open carry fundamentalist Christians, will do.
It means they will comply and give the data away.
The tech bros at these FAANG companies will give into law enforcement with your privacy destroyed and violated, something the Free Software Foundation (FSF) had been fighting to prevent and to totally remove such surveillance capitalist products made by these companies. That fight has been lost and is a complete failure.
Now these data barons will comply, happily give your data away and they do not care and won't change.