The Jane Collective, a group that provided abortions, was raided by the Chicago police. In Illinois, abortion was a criminal offense in the year before the Supreme Court legalized it.
Two of the seven women arrested had the names and addresses of patients on their cards. According to a history written by a member of the collective, the women destroyed the cards in the police van and ate some of them. They had no idea what the police might do with the information.
The Supreme Court reversed the decision. Most of the country will ban or limit abortions. Thanks to the digital trails left behind in the modern technological age, it will be much harder to hide incriminating data about a decision to end a pregnant woman's life.
When a draft of the court's decision was leaked in May, people focused on the information that millions of women share about their menstrual cycles on period tracker apps. The advice was to get rid of them all. It's immediately.
Gina Neff is the director of the Minderoo Center for Technology and Democracy at the University of Cambridge. The apps contained information about reproductive choices that is now a threat, according to Dr. Neff.
Users can get predictions about when they are most fertile and when they are ovulating with the help of these apps. Sexual activity, birth control methods and conception attempts can be recorded in the apps. Some women use the apps when they are trying to get pregnant, others don't, and many just know when their next period is going to be.
The instructions to get rid of them didn't work out. According to Data.ai, the downloads of period tracking apps doubled in the days after the case was thrown out.
Clue and Stardust made public commitments to data protection after the Supreme Court's decision. Clue wouldn't comply with requests for users' health information from U.S. law enforcement, according to a spokeswoman.
Period trackers are an obvious source of information about reproductive health, but other digital information is more likely to put women at risk. Cynthia Conti-Cook, a civil rights lawyer and technology fellow at the Ford Foundation, researched prosecutions of pregnant people accused of feticide or endangering their fetus, cataloging the digital evidence used against them.
I got a text from your sister that said, "expletive, I'm pregnant." There are websites that have information about abortion and the search history for abortion pills.
Latice Fisher, a Mississippi woman, was charged with second-degree murder after her baby was stillborn. According to a local report, investigators downloaded the contents of her phone, including her internet search history, and she admitted to conducting internet searches, including how to induce a miscarriage. The case against Ms. Fisher was dropped.
In Indiana, text messages to a friend about taking abortion pills late in a pregnant woman's life were used to convict Purvi Patel, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for feticide and neglect of a dependent.
Ms. Conti-Cook said that the intent evidence that prosecutors want to fill their bag of evidence is text messages and websites.
If a state passes a law forbidding women from traveling to areas where abortion is legal, investigators could potentially use the location data on their phones. Data brokers sell information about people's movements via their phones.
The New York Times was able to identify a woman who had spent an hour at a women's health center. In May, a journalist at Vice was able to buy information from a data broker about phones that had been carried to the women's health organization for just $170. The data broker said it would stop selling data after Vice reported.
In the past, anti-abortion activists have created a digital border around them and used ads on phones to convince women to stop having abortions.
Attempts are made to get the attention of people who go online for help with abortions. People looking for information about how to end a pregnant woman's life are more likely to find it at the top of search results. Sometimes a website will try to collect information about the person when they click on it.
The bigger question is whether law enforcement will be as aggressive in states with abortion bans as they are in other states. Those who advise against the use of period trackers fear dragnet-style searches for people who were pregnant and stopped being.
It is difficult to say what will happen where and when, but the possibilities are very dangerous. It's easy to be overwhelmed by all the possibilities, which is why I try to emphasize what we've seen used against people.
She mentioned websites visited and email receipts. That's what we've seen
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