Latice Fisher, a woman from Mississippi, had a baby in April of last year. She was indicted on a murder charge. She had murdered her fetus and prosecutors used her search history and online purchase of a drug to prove it.
Activists, academics, and lawyers who spoke to WIRED are worried that cases like Fisher's may become more common and that tech companies may be involved.
Cynthia Conti Cook, a litigator and tech fellow at the Ford Foundation, says that what we know is what law enforcement has already done in criminal court.
Some large tech companies, includingSalesforce and Amazon, have responded to increasing abortion restrictions by offering to support employees seeking to relocate or reimburse workers who travel out of state for medical care. Questions remain about whether they will share user data with law enforcement or allow abortion-related content to remain on their platforms.
Albert Fox Cahn is the executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project.
Most major tech companies don't sell user data because they rely on advertising revenue. The fact that they collect and store so much information about their users makes them targets for law enforcement officials.
The location data of people who had visited abortion clinics was bought by Motherboard from a data broker on the open market. Jolynn Dellinger, a lecturer at Duke Law School who specializes in data ethics, says that this kind of information could be used by law enforcement to serve a company with a request for a user's data.
The easiest way to not comply with legal requests for data is to not keep and store user data, according to Fox Cahn. 25 percent of the requests for data from the US were for warrants.
A report from last month found that Apple, Meta, and other companies had responded to fraudulent legal requests for user data, despite the fact that they believed the requests to be illegitimate.
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