Data Brokers Track Abortion Clinic Visits for Anyone to Buy

If the war in Ukraine and Russia's still-unfolding atrocities there didn't offer enough fodder for doom, this week provided a new dose of domestic crisis: a leaked Supreme Court draft decision that would overturn the Wade ruling. This crisis will play out in the digital realm as much as the physical ones.

If you are seeking an abortion in a near-future world in which the procedure has been overturned, WIRED's Lilly Hay Newman has a guide to protect your privacy. As right-wing pundits demand the Supreme Court leaker's prosecution, we analyzed the laws regarding leaks of unclassified government information like a draft court ruling and found that there is no clear statute criminalizing that sort of information sharing. The history of Supreme Court information leaks goes back hundreds of years.

We looked at how small, consumer-grade drones are being used in the war in Ukraine by Russia, which is the first time in history that has happened. In India, a battle is taking shape between PureVPN firms and the Indian government, which is demanding they hand over users data. User privacy concerns have been raised by the country's new app.

There is more. We rounded up all the news that we didn't cover in-depth. Click on the headlines to read the full story. Stay safe out there.

The question of who can digitally surveil those seeking abortions and abortion providers will become a civil liberties battle of the highest importance if the precedent ceases to protect people seeking abortions across the United States. This week, Joseph Cox, a writer for Motherboard, wrote about a series of stories about data brokers who offer to sell location data that includes individuals' visits to abortion clinics and Planned Parenthood offices, an egregious form of surveillance capitalism with immediate human consequences. Anti-abortion protest groups have already used abortion clinic data to target ads at women inside the clinics, and the same data could soon be used to identify women who seek out-of-state abortions in violation of local laws.

Cox pointed to two companies that sold location data of people who visited abortion clinics. Placer.ai has gone so far as to offer heat maps of where abortion clinic visitors live to anyone who creates a free account on its site. SafeGraph, which was banned from the Play store in June, responded to the story by committing to stop selling abortion-related location data. One of its investors, Are Traasdahl, says he will be donating the money he makes from the sale of his stake in the company to charity.

Placer.ai, your move.

While we're shaming firms that leak or sell their users' location data, Grindr has long represented a uniquely dangerous combination: a company that courts-risk users, and then egregiously fails to protect their privacy. The Wall Street Journal revealed this week that the location data of millions of gay men was sold for years through ad networks. The revelation follows years of Grindr data abuses and inattention to privacy and security, such as allowing anyone to identify users with a triangulation technique, and even turning a blind eye as one man's life was ruined by spoofed Grindr accounts.

In 2022, a Russian military occupation does not just mean physical destruction from shelling, war crimes, and mass deportations of Ukrainian civilians to Russian hinterlands. In the Russian-occupied region of Kherson in southern Ukraine, Ukrainians have been disconnected from the global internet and routed through Russia. Russia appears to be experimenting with extending its internet oppression to the victims of its military conquests in order to better control and influence digital information there too.

Last month, The New Yorker published an in-depth investigation of how the Israeli hacking firm NSO Group's highly sophisticated smartphone spyware known as Pegasus was used to target members of Spain's Catalan independence movement. The prime minister and the defense minister of Spain have both said that their phones were hacked in May. The hacking was revealed by security researchers at Citizen Lab. While the Spanish government has claimed that the hacking must have been carried out by a foreign culprit, the targets of Pegasus have pointed the finger at their own.

The US Treasury announced on Friday that it is issuing sanctions against a service that is used to obscure the origins and destinations of cryptocurrencies. The US Department of Justice has prosecuted Mixers for helping to obscure the criminal origins of the digital currency. The first time that the Treasury has taken measures to financially ostracize a mixer is with the sanctions against Blender.io. In this case, it is accused of helping to laundered over 20 million dollars of the $620 million worth of cryptocurrencies that North Korea's Lazarus hackers stole from the company in March. It is believed that North Korean thieves have already topped the $400 million they stole last year.