The cover story of the New York Times Magazine was about Andrew Pole, a Target statistician who was tasked with inventing a way to identify pregnant shoppers even if they didn't want the company to know. Pole said that Target wanted to get in front of the multi-million dollar market of moms-to-be so that it wouldn't have to compete with them.
Pole said yes. After crawling through the freight of sale data from statewide shoppers, he came up with a "pregnancy prediction" score that the company would internally assign to each of its regular customers. If you believe the rumors, Target sent coupons for cribs to a teenage girl before her father knew she was pregnant.
The story ten years later is less like a quirk of capitalism and more like a sign. Every company is trying to get you to give them data. If there is enough evidence, police and private citizens can go after people who seek abortions if there is enough evidence.
There is a lot of data to go around and a lot of players willing to pawn it off. An investigation into some of the nation's biggest data brokers found more than two dozen that promoted access to datasets containing digital information on millions of pregnant and potentially pregnant people. One of those companies offered a large number of people who were using the same types of birth control that are being targeted by more restrictive states.
There are 32 different brokers across the U.S. that sell access to the unique mobile IDs. There is data on 478 million customer profiles that are interested in becoming pregnant. The full list of companies can be found here.
The datasets were sold on a CPM basis, meaning that whoever buys them only pays for the number of end- users that are reached with an ad. The price per user ranged from 49 cents to $2.25 depending on who was giving up the data.
Some 3.4 billion people are covered by the data, but how many of them are unique is not known. Half the world doesn't live in the US, and half the world isn't pregnant, so multiple brokers are selling the same thing. Sources do differ. Some brokers were able to glean this information from pregnant people who had agreed to have their data shared through these channels when they downloaded a given app. Target had done the same thing in other cases, instead of collecting data from end- users that were explicitly saying they were pregnant, the brokers instead modeled a core base of potentially pregnant users.
Gizmodo was able to find likely data sources for 19 of the data brokers by looking at previous partnerships. It was impossible to know where the remaining players were getting their data due to the complex nature of the data-sharing platform. It waserie.
In one instance, a company called AlikeAudience was selling access to an estimated 61 million people who were at a "Pregnancy & Maternity Life Stage," but the listing didn't go into detail about the source of that data. AlikeAudience collects data from various sources such as users' mobile app downloads and usage, as well as public records such as POI and self-declared information.
It's possible that AlikeAudience used its relationship with Mastercard to see who was buying maternity care items. You can fill in the blanks yourself if you want, since the company didn't specify what a "maternity care" product is in this listing.
The data broker Quotient gave marketers access to the devices of 960,000 female contraceptive buyers, as well as the devices of 9.6 million pregnant women.
The company owned the popular couponing site, coupons.com, and didn't make it clear where it got that purchasing data from. In the past, the site has offered coupons for products, but not currently. Quotient had access to purchasing data from shoppers at Giant Eagle through a proprietary ad network the data broker operated.
The two companies have yet to respond to the requests for comment.
Mastercard uses anonymized transaction data to gather data at the postal code level. AlikeAudience claims to be able to create links between users whovoluntarily give up their data and those who don't. Mastercard said it limits how insights from data can be used.
"When we hear about data that impacts the privacy of people seeking reproductive care, it's easy to think about period tracking apps or the name of a person who visits an abortion clinic." There are different types of data that threaten the privacy of those people. There is a lot of data here.
Sherman said that anyone seeking reproductive care in the U.S. is leaving behind a massive digital footprint. We have seen at least one case of a woman being used to prosecute her in her stillborn baby's death because of her search queries. Sherman said that even if someone deleted one of those period tracking apps, there were still websites that potential parents could visit and post on.
Bennett Cyphers, a staff technologist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said that commercial data brokers are a big risk for abortion seekers since they put people into lists that make it easier for someone to narrow down who they are.
Liveramp is a company that functions as a distribution hub for a lot of data brokers' wares. There were no restrictions on the purchase of two-thirds of the databases. One dataset containing 2,030,000 users who were "interested in pregnancy" required authorization from Liveramp before they could purchase. The same thing happened for another set of 5,400,000 users that were labeled expecting mothers and another set of 17,000,000 users that were labeled likely to have a baby in the next year.
Cut Liveramp out of the equation completely and go directly to the smaller broker to sell that data. According to a product manager working for a popular data broker, this approach is a lot simpler.
In the post-Roe era, pregnant women's data is going to be a big boon for law enforcement. The product manager said that if you are a cop, you can fill out a form and ask how much it will cost. They might say 'ACAB, pound sand!'. It is more likely that they will say "put another zero after it" and see if they agree.
He went on to say that there was precedent for selling to law enforcement. Someone else is likely to do it if you don't do it.
For years, federal law enforcement has been watching data brokers and apps. According to a watchdog group, Coinbase had been selling data to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Researchers at the Center for Democracy and Technology found that agencies were exploiting loopholes in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act by buying data from brokers. According to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, border patrol officers were collecting location data from phone owners every minute. Most of the data came from a contract with a location data broker that is a subsidiary of an adtech firm.
Gizmodo searched for companies brokering maternity data and found GravyAnalytics. The company boasted access to about four million devices from people that had recently shopped for maternity clothing, based on 100% deterministic location data. Gizmodo found another location data-broker, called Cuebiq, which gave access to the devices of 11 million people who visited maternity destinations.
The maternity destination tag was claimed to be for stores that sell children's apparel or toys. The data set doesn't include sensitive data related to healthcare, and they don't have a commercial relationship with federal or local law enforcement.
The company said that they have a policy to challenge any warrants or subpoenas related to reproductive healthcare cases in states that ban abortion.
A spokesman for Gravy said that their data is based on foot traffic in maternity stores and that they don't share it with law enforcement.
It is almost impossible to know which app each company is using. Rather than maintaining a direct relationship with people's apps, most of these outfits source their data from other brokers, which source their data from other brokers. You understand the concept.
Some companies claim that the data included in the data sets is not from personal identifiable information. It is trivial for anyone with the right knowledge to tie that information to individual online users.
The developers of the apps fueling this industry probably have no idea where their users' data ends up, according to a recent post by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Users don't have much hope of knowing whether or not their data arrives in the hands of the data broker.
The product manager spoke with Gizmodo and said that the data is getting harder to collect.
We get regular updates on how we can expect scale to go down. Data brokers can't get a full picture of your location because most apps don't get to access location all the time.
This doesn't mean authorities aren't buying people's location data anymore He said that the contract was like throwing the dice.
The police will end up with a partial view of who was at location X if they buy data broker A but not data broker B. Does the hypothetical use of data as a way of indicting people hinges on what free game app they play? Temple Run sold you out and Alphabears should have been on the show.
Kade Crockford is the Technology for Liberty program director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts.
It is not clear how much police will get out of the data. There have not been any cases where local and state law enforcement have tapped data brokers for information on suspects' pregnancies related to an alleged crime. This data is still useful to police. Police use commercial data to find associations of property ownership, including houses, boats or cars, according to Crockford.
According to research done by If/When/How, there have been 60 cases of prosecutions against pregnant women since the beginning of the 21st century. The majority of these cases have relied on women's online activity, though information is often handed over to police willingly or is taken off of digital devices with a warrant.
Law enforcement could be using commercial data in the future. In an interview, Jumana Musa, the Fourth Amendment Center director for the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said that this kind of commercial data on pregnancies is a really valuable treasure trove.
Munsa believes that broker data is a way for cops and prosecutors to get around the need for a warrant. Munsa said prosecutors have the option of subpoenaing the data brokers if the info is out of reach due to expense or refusal to sell.
Can they decide if they want to track all the people who go to a particular clinic or where they get abortions? Musa agreed. It is very easy for them to do that.
According to NACDL Executive Director Lisa Wayne, the bar for evidence in an abortion case could be low. The legal concept of "mens rea" is the intention or knowledge of wrongdoing in the case of an alleged crime.
It is a legal bar used in many infanticide cases. The case of Latice Fischer, a black woman from Mississippi, who had a stillbirth at 35 weeks into her baby's life, is one of the examples. Critics pointed out that investigators didn't have any proof that she bought or took any pills Prosecutors used web history to charge her with second degree murder. The charges against Fisher were dropped in 2020.
The commercial data could be useful if law enforcement were to use it to surveil people who were interested in abortion. He said that it was more likely that anti- abortion groups would get their hands on the data.
There have been few cases from the state that show how far abortion opponents will go in their lawsuits. In his case, Dr. Alan Braid posted an op-ed in The Washington Post in order to get his case heard. The group Texas Right to Life still has a website, even after it was kicked off multiple websites.
Anti-abortion activists have taken data to push their agenda. In the case of the advertising agency in Massachusetts, they used the technology to target women in and around the clinics of the abortion provider. What is the best way to stop anti-abortion groups from advertising?
It is worth noting that the 32 brokers that Gizmodo found are unlikely to be the last ones to sell data related to people's pregnancies or birth control options. Estimates show that the market for contraceptives is going to keep increasing, and that the market for pregnancy care products is going to keep increasing as well. There will be a lot of money involved when a product needs to be marketed.
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By subscribing you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.Sherman said that data brokers talk about legitimate business reasons. They transact in highly sensitive information about people who usually don't even know they're being watched. They want to make a profit.
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