Is it safe to keep using period and fertility apps in a post-roe America
romper.com
romper.com
Let's do a thought experiment: say the speed limit in State X is 60mph. In State Y is it is 70mph.
If you went to State Y and drove at 70mph there, will the police in State X arrest you when you come back because you went over 60mph, even though the claimed "offence" was in a different jurisdiction where it was totally legal?
This whole thing about people having abortions where it is 100% legal (or even just - heaven forbid - tracking menstrual cycles) and then getting into trouble for it in places where abortion is not legal seems really weird. I can't believe it is being discussed in the US - this is like something out of Afghanistan.
Antiabortion lawmakers want to block patients from crossing state lines: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/29/abortion-...
Applying this kind of logic to speeding or indeed healthcare does seem like an overreach of government - but in general Americans who support women's reproductive rights favour more government overreach, not less.
> but in general Americans who support women's reproductive rights favour more government overreach, not less
Compared to what?
It's just a smear. Biased language ("overreach") addressing generalities rather than specifics is how you nudge people toward "this group is bad, because they favor [biased language bad thing that everyone agrees is bad—what, are you going to defend 'overreach'? Of course not]".
You get to count on their vote by default, so you don't have to consider or campaign towards anything else they want.
It's especially good when these single issue voters are so extreme that the party can slip in policies that are against their other interests but still get their vote.
TL;DR, single issue voters are NPCs.
These voters have been vindicated as doing exactly the right thing, according to their views, now that his court appointments have lead to the loss of Roe.
And then of course they fell into supporting his election fraud lies.
The American church is dying because it can't stop making deals with the devil on the issues of abortion and LGBT liberty, both issues that Jesus said absolutely nothing about. Meanwhile, he said a hell of a lot about helping the poor, the sick, and the foreigner.
In my mind, this kind of person isn't a real follower of Christ. They're modern day pharisees. Hypocrites who Jesus would have hated.
Sure, you nominally have freedom-of-movement within the US. In practice, however, there's plenty of ways you can make people decide not to move. California is basically unlivable if you don't like three-hour traffic jams or paying insane rent, because the state is structured with a landed gentry of suburban old-time homeowners. Now, Texas is unlivable if you are an unmarried woman or want your children to be taught the history of racism in America[0].
The real thing that has screwed over Republicans is their stance on immigration. They could be reliably importing hordes of conservative voters from other countries if they hadn't spent so much time demonizing them for being too conservative.
[0] The laws on the books only talk about "critical race theory". However it is actually rather difficult to explain, say, Jim Crow laws or the nadir of race relations without embracing at least some of CRT's base assumptions.
Slave states where trying to push their state laws as federal laws and circumventing non-slave state sovereignty and federal laws.
There are probably enough ways to pass laws that are not unconstitutional in immediately apparent ways that would still interfere with abortion access across state lines. And even then I think it is quite likely that a few blatantly unconstitutional ones will be passed as well, and who knows how that will end.
Some states are just taking a scorched earth approach here, and nothing would surprise me about what they will try to do to punish anyone who is even tangentially involved in the process...
I can personally vouch for the fact that hospitals in my red state were excessively timid about providing necessary or beneficial care that looked too abortion-like—with Roe-v-Wade compliant state restrictions on abortion in place. It's a safe bet that'll be even worse now.
Like, Finnish law claims jurisdiction over all crimes committed against or by Finnish citizens committed abroad, no matter the location or acts legality per local law, if the crime could result in prison term of 6 months or longer according to the criminal code of Finland. We also claim jurisdiction over some particularly heinous crimes committed abroad no matter the nationality of victim or perpetrator. I think it is very rare to see it applied, because crimes according to Finnish law are often crimes abroad, too (I mean, the location of country often takes precedence?). And I don't think our laws grant our authorities power to act outside territory of Finland (like the US sometimes does).
But if a Finnish citizen traveled to country X, did something bad enough to mandate a long prison sentence, came back to Finland, was found, and for one reason or other were not extradited back to X for trial there, they would be tried here.
Apple does a pretty good job of taking this into account, minus their iCloud "back door," but they're almost the only big company that does this, and obviously a big part of that is a strategic opposition to both Google and Facebook. I could be wrong, but it seems to me like, after Apple, the only companies who even think about this are relatively small, privacy-focused companies like ProtonMail.
It is not.
Thus, no.
Risk isn't black and white, you have to actually measure things and not be ideological about it.
Time to start erasing your digital footprint.
Even if police were able to get a warrant and were willing to try taking a drink from the firehose of user data... it's hard to imagine they could glean anything useful that would meet evidence standards? Like how do you differentiate a pregnancy from a few months of inactivity? And how do you tie random usernames to real people?
I get that you can theoretically connect the dots here, but it doesn't seem like a plausible concern.
We do not already see courts filling up with police using app data to crack down on speeding drivers or underage drinking or other illegal activities.
The police don't have to do the work of correlating the data themselves. Would you stake your freedom on the idea that there's not a data broker somewhere buying up data and correlating it to create a "pregnancy score" for advertisers that might also be useful for law enforcement?
I administer marketing systems for a living, and on a good day we hit 1 target out of a hundred. People really overestimate how sophisticated the data is.
Police could have gone around buying phone books to look for parole jumpers - but the cost/benefit ratio on following up on every potential name would have been absurd. This would be a whole other magnitude above that.
> Police could have gone around buying phone books to look for parole jumpers - but the cost/benefit ratio would have been absurd. This would be a whole other magnitude above that.
I'm not sure the cost will matter much when we're talking about an ideological crusade like this.
But I think the risk of people being "caught" with this data is absolutely minimal.
> I'm honestly not sure the cost will matter much when we're talking about an ideological crusade like this.
Okay, but even in like the darkest days of prohibition when the federal government had a literal mandate to round up every person in the US for illegal drinking, not even a fraction of a percent of the obviously guilty population was even charged with a crime. At a certain point, laws themselves are a legal fiction if they are unenforceable and police will only ever focus on a few high profile cases. So I guess I am cynical myself, but also trying to be rational here.