Rogelio V. Solis/AP Photo
Abortion rights supporters protest at the Mississippi Capitol, in Jackson, Mississippi, June 28, 2022.
Within the next few weeks, abortion will become illegal in roughly half the country. Though conservatives profess that their concern lies with the doctors who perform abortions and anyone who helps them, women were being charged with murder even before the decision was final. With some states deputizing citizens to essentially hunt abortion seekers and those who aid them, criminalization of a medical procedure is now reality once again.
In this digital age, abortion seekers have far more incentive to be cautious about whom and what they share their plans with. Before Roe, obtaining an illegal abortion was mostly about knowing the right people and maintaining covertness. But in the post-Roe world, when a person’s movements—both digital and physical—can be tracked, seeking an abortion is far more complicated.
“The greatest security risk to people seeking abortion is other people—whether those are people they have shared information about needing an abortion, or health care providers they turned to for help,” Farah Diaz-Tello, legal director at If/When/How, told me over email.
Most communications in the modern age—emails, text messages, social media posts, geolocation and mapping information, data from health apps, purchases or travel or pregnancy tests or medications, web searches and other forms of browsing—can be tracked. That data can easily lead anyone interested to decipher the intent to obtain an abortion. If state law enforcement arms receive such data, they can create a digital surveillance state to restrict reproductive choice and punish anyone who deviates from their goals.
Big Tech, a decidedly nonhuman entity that vacuums up the bulk of this data, is far from a passive middleman. Major companies like Facebook and Twitter regularly store information about their users, such as searches and interactions, that they then package and sell to private companies and governments. As Reveal from The Center for Investigative Reporting and The Markup found, Facebook collects data on people visiting crisis pregnancy centers, the anti-abortion facilities that pretend otherwise to lure in unsuspecting people and bombard them with propaganda about abortion. As Reveal pointed out, this data can be used to build anti-abortion ad campaigns or to employ targeted ads, but it may also be used “as evidence against abortion seekers in states where the procedure is outlawed.”
The FDA permanently approved sending abortion pills through the mail after a telehealth consultation in late 2021, but with the overturning of Roe, some predict this will become an increasingly contentious battleground. As the Prospect pointed out, “the largest abortion provider in America, in effect, is the United States Postal Service, which can deliver abortion medications throughout the country.” Even in states that bar the practice of telehealth, there are overseas options for medication abortions that are out of the reach of state law enforcement.
Still, Americans have to be aware of these options, and Facebook and Instagram have been accused of deleting posts offering to send people the appropriate medication to induce an abortion. Not only are large tech firms blocking access to information abortion seekers need, they may be, directly or indirectly, giving up other forms of information to authorities that will arrest those abortion seekers.
Big Tech, a decidedly nonhuman entity that vacuums up the bulk of this data, is far from a passive middleman.
Because the digital sphere is so seemingly hostile to abortion seekers, circles of women on social media have been sharing tips for maintaining privacy when it comes to reproductive health, especially for those who find themselves needing or wanting an abortion. The most popularly shared suggestion has been for menstruating people to delete period-tracking applications. This is an important suggestion as it ensures anti-choice adversaries cannot access critical information about a menstrual cycle that can later be used against someone. Someone who marked how long ago they last menstruated can be in legal jeopardy if they are suspected of having an abortion outside of the mandated time frame.
Still, deleting period-tracking apps is far from all that is necessary if an abortion seeker is located in a deeply anti-choice state. Organizations like the Digital Defense Fund are encouraging further measures to protect individual privacy.
Someone who needs an abortion can take care to lock down their digital history before they seek information about the procedure. Location services can be disabled in a phone’s settings, so that physical movements are harder to track and so apps cannot sell location data.
Tech platforms and apps typically turn over this kind of information when presented with a warrant, so Digital Defense Fund recommends using a secure search browser and disabling the mobile advertisement ID. Digital Defense Fund recommends privacy-secure browsers such as DuckDuckGo for desktop and Firefox Focus. (Note: DuckDuckGo has privacy policy exceptions.) The mobile ad ID is a unique identifier that can be used to link movements and interest together.
Sometimes people inappropriately gain access to information, including by invading a person’s privacy through a hack or a phishing scheme. To combat the risk of an anti-abortion adversary finding out about an abortion, Digital Defense Fund also recommends creating an email specifically for the purpose of getting pertinent information about an upcoming procedure, and then deleting the account after it is done; the organization also suggests using cash or a prepaid gift card to pay for the procedure.
If someone needs to text about their procedure, they can use an encrypted messaging service like WhatsApp or Signal to communicate. These apps have disappearing message options that often need to be user-enabled, ensuring that communication about abortions will not be stored.
This is not hyperbole or fear-mongering. A lack of abortion rights ensures that women will die for trying to end an unwanted pregnancy. Women have been put in jail for abortions (and stillbirths), and prosecutors really can use personal communications to attempt to convict abortion seekers.
Still, as Diaz-Tello told me, “The precipitating factor is always someone else reporting them to law enforcement, who then have the power to seize people’s devices … Understanding how to reduce one’s digital footprint is important, but the first line of defense is not sharing information unless absolutely necessary.”
Over the longer term, questions are sure to be raised about why Big Tech firms store so much information about their users, which can be used as the basis for criminal prosecutions for seeking medical treatment. Without targeted ads as the basis of the Big Tech business model, this data would be more anonymized and inaccessible. Certain digital footprints like emails and texts would still be available, but a mass of other data would no longer be tied to individuals specifically, and they could be more assured of not having their private lives used as tools for persecution.
