WASHINGTON – After the Supreme Court ended the constitutional protection of abortion, four Democratic MPs asked federal regulators to investigate Apple and Google for alleged fraud of millions of mobile phone users, allowing the collection and sale of their personal data to third parties .
A decision by the court’s conservative majority on Friday to overturn Rowe against Wade is expected to lead to abortion bans in about half of the states. Privacy experts say this can make women vulnerable because their personal data can be used to monitor pregnancies and shared with police or sold to vigilantes. Online searches, periodic apps, fitness trackers, and hotlines can become rich sources of data for such monitoring efforts.
The request to investigate the two California-based technology giants came Friday in a letter to Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Hahn. It was signed by Democrats Ron Wyden of Oregon, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Corey Booker of New Jersey and Representative Sarah Jacobs of California. It was sent shortly before the Supreme Court announced its decision to overturn the 1973 precedent, noting that the court was likely to do so.
“Persons seeking abortion and other reproductive health care will become particularly vulnerable to harm to privacy, including through the collection and sharing of location data,” the lawmakers said in a letter. “Data brokers already sell, license and share location information to people who visit abortion providers with a credit card.
They said prosecutors in states where abortion becomes illegal could soon receive orders for information about the location of anyone who has visited an abortion provider.
“Private actors will also be encouraged by state awards laws to prosecute women who have had or are seeking an abortion by having access to location information through shadow data brokers,” lawmakers wrote.
They asked Han to investigate Apple and Google’s practices regarding mobile phone data in general. They accused the companies of “engaging in dishonest and fraudulent practices, allowing the collection and sale of hundreds of millions of personal data to mobile phone users.”
Companies “deliberately facilitated” harmful practices by incorporating location identifiers used for advertising into their mobile phone operating systems, lawmakers said.
FTC spokesman Peter Kaplan confirmed that the agency had received the letter, but said there would be no comment on it.
Apple and Google did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
The lawmakers’ letter notes that Apple and Google are already allowing users to opt out of tracking data. However, Apple is said to have recently activated the default tracking ID and required users to delve into confusing phone settings to turn it off. Google still activates it by default and until recently did not even give users the option to opt out, the letter said.
Last month, Wyden, Warren, and Booker, along with Senators Edward Markie, D-Mass., And Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Called on Google and Apple CEOs to ban Google Play Store and Apple App Store apps from using data retrieval practices that could facilitate the referral of abortion seekers.
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