Does my period app know too much?

In 1965, eight years before the landmark Roe v Wade ruling, University of Chicago student Heather Booth slowly became entrenched in world of underground abortion services. She started off by helping an acquaintance get access to a doctor to terminate her pregnancy – this incident snowballed into a secret referral service that later became known as The Jane Collective. Operating out of her college dorm under the pseudonym ‘Jane’, Heather referred women seeking abortions to a surgeon, who would discreetly help their manage their pregnancies, in a time when to do so was illegal in many states. Women were told to ask for ‘Jane’, leading them to a phone number that would connect them to a woman who could advocate for them and safely guide them through what was often a distressing experience. Heather later recruited ten other women to run the organisation, which was formally named Abortion Counselling Service of Women's Liberation. The members put up posters and advertisements with messages to the following effect – "Pregnant? Don't want to be? Call Jane". The Collective was eventually disbanded after the Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision recognised the basic right of women to seek an abortion.

In the many years since, the ruling has come under repeated challenges, and on June 24th, 2022, it was overturned in a landmark moment –

The decision dismantled over 50 years of protection and has made it possible for US states to place heavy restrictions on abortion rights.

In the heyday of The Jane Collective, it was widely believed that law enforcement turned a blind eye to most underground abortion service providers, allowing them to operate in relative peace. However, in the decades since, privacy has become a preciously guarded state. It is now nearly impossible to exist without some form of our personal data being available for consumption online. Health-related information, while not as freely available as social media profiles, is now easy enough to obtain using the right resources.

The most prominent sources, now coming under intense scrutiny, are period and fertility tracking apps, which have seen an uptick in use over the past decade – the apps Flo and Clue currently have over 55 million users combined. The information stored on these apps primarily includes dates of menstrual cycles, pregnancies, and fertility and information, with the purpose of tracking menstrual cycle dates and conception of pregnancies.

These apps act as digital journals of sorts, where one can even track sexual activity and birth control usage, as well as other health-related topics.

In a paper published in 2020, Cynthia Conti-Cook, a technology fellow at the Ford Foundation, researched the use of digital paper trails to prosecute pregnant people who were accused of endangerment of their foetus. Ms Conti-Cook explores a range of cases in which evidence was pulled from internet searches for abortion-inducing pills and visits to websites providing information on pregnancy termination, as well as text messages to family and friends that mentioned the aforementioned subjects.

Even more insidious is the idea that location tracking services have the ability to identify whether a person is visiting an abortion clinic, or a sexual health service. It has also been proven time and time again to be astonishingly easy to obtain location data from data brokers – as part of journalistic investigations, publications including as Vice and The New York Times have been able to buy data revealing visits by women to organisations such as Planned Parenthood as well as the duration of time they spent there.

This is far from a foreign concept – in 1972, The Jane Collective was raided by Chicago police. One of the members later wrote about how the women arrested had sets of index cards with patients’ names and addresses on them. They destroyed these cards in the police van, shredding them into small bits and eating some to protect their clients. It was rightly presumed that if this information got into the wrong hands, there would be dire consequences for the women implicated. The question thus arises: is it too far-fetched to assume that modern equivalents of these index cards would similarly inculpate the women using them?

Period tracking apps already have a dubious track record when it comes to data protection

The app Flo was accused of misleading users and sharing sensitive data with Facebook among other companies, although Flo did not admit to any wrongdoing and eventually reached a settlement with the Federal Trade Commission. The app Stardust was caught sharing user phone numbers with a third party, and falsely claimed to have end-to-end encryption.

With the overturn of Roe v Wade, several companies have come forward to reassure users of their commitment to data protection. Google declared that, while they continue to collect location data, they will automatically delete location date from user visits to medical centres and abortion clinics. Flo recently came out with an ‘anonymous’ mode that would allow users to use the app without sharing any identifiable information. Meanwhile, the Berlin-based app Clue stated that European laws are more protective of sensitive data and that information shared on their app cannot be used by US prosecutors.

Data protection is an issue most of us are unlikely to give deep consideration to in our daily lives, but with reproductive autonomy now being stripped away from millions of women one does question: just how far is law enforcement likely to go to implicate people seeking to end their pregnancy?

The answer remains unclear – the possibility of private companies buying personal data to track down women who have sought abortions is remote. However, by virtue of this data existing in the first place, law enforcement groups are more likely to get their hands on it. As Ms Conti- Cook stated,

“It’s hard to say what will happen where and how and when, but the possibilities are pretty perilous.”

With basic reproductive rights protection being actively stripped in the United States, it pays to be aware of the challenges made to similar protections elsewhere in the world – it certainly does not hurt to be more vigilant about how we share our personal data and where it goes.