Three Democratic members of Congress are introducing a bill to limit companies’ ability to hoover up data about people’s reproductive health – a measure, they say, that is necessary to protect women from persecution in the post-Roe v Wade era.
Representative of California, Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon on Wednesday willfile the My Body, My Data Act in both the US House and Senate.The bill aims to block companies from collecting, using, retaining or disclosing information about someone’s reproductive healthunless that data is essential to providing a requested service. This provision would apply to information about pregnancy, menstruation, abortion, contraception and other matters relating to reproductive health.
“Young people live our lives online, right? That includes tracking our periods, but it also includes our phones tracking our location and using Google to think about your medical care or how to obtain an abortion for yourself or a friend, or ordering abortion pills online, or using an Uber to travel to an abortion clinic,” Jacobs said. “All of those things are tracked online, and none of those are protected right now.”
Law enforcement officials have already attempted to use people’s data trails to identifyabortion seekers.In 2022, the year that the US supreme court overturned Roe, Nebraska brought a series of felony and misdemeanor charges against a teenager and her mother in connection to the teen’s abortion.The charges relied on Facebook chats, which the social media giant had turned over. (Both the teenager and her motherpleaded guiltyand were sentenced to time behind bars .) In 2023, anti-abortion activists used cellphone location information to send anti-abortion messages to people who had visited some Planned Parenthood clinics. And in May, a Texas police officer searched tens of automatic license plate reader cameras, including in states that permit abortion, for a woman who officials suspected ofself-managing an abortion.
The post-Roe landscape is also creating more opportunities for online surveillance. In recent years, orders for abortion pills onlinehave spiked, as tens of thousands more Americans have used online services to obtain pills to “self-manage” their own abortions.
A number of women have alsofaced criminal chargesover miscarriages, leading abortion rights advocates to worry that women who Google phrases like “how to get an abortion” and then miscarry could find themselves in law enforcement’s crosshairs.
“It doesn’t deal with everything in terms of data brokers, but it does put women in a much stronger position to protect their rights,” Wyden said of the My Body, My Data Act. “Reproductive rights are the ultimate privacy priority, because the fundamental right of a woman to control her own body and her own healthcare is as private as it gets.”
An earlier version of the bill was introduced in 2023. Given that Republicans control Congress, the bill is not likely to pass.
“I have many Republican colleagues who say they care about data privacy. We work together on data privacy in every other area, but when it comes to anything abortion-related, they refuse to do it,” Jacobs said. “This is also the third oldest Congress in history, and I’ll be honest, many of my colleagues don’t understand how period tracking apps or website searches or location data even work.”
Jacobs saysshe uses a period tracker run by a company based in Europe that is subject to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation, a set of strict regulations that governs how businesses obtain and handle people’s online data.
While the US has no similar regulations on the federal level, Washington state in 2023 became the first in the country to create a state version of theMy Health, My Data Act. That law covers health data that is not otherwise protected by the US Health Information Portability and Accountability Act (Hipaa) – including information about reproductive healthcare services – and requires companies to give their customers more privacy disclosures and seek their authorization before selling their data. It also gives Washington residents the ability to demand those companies delete their personal information.
Jacobs advises people to use apps based in states with some degree of protection for reproductive health data.
She added: “If you live in a state that is really criminalizing abortion and going after people, you should be careful about what you put online.”