T3THICS WEEK 11: The Digital Battleground for Abortion Rights
Abortion and privacy rights have always been intertwined, but surveillance capitalism and our digital lives have made the connection stronger and more important than ever
T3THICS is Monika & Marta’s weekly roundup of tech ethics news (and olds) - and our quick thoughts on them.
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Digital Frontiers in the Fight for Abortion Rights
On May 3, Politico dropped a bombshell by publishing Justice Samuel Alito’s draft opinion that guts Roe v. Wade, the landmark SCOTUS case which guaranteed US women the right to abortion. Roe was imperilled with the election of Donald Trump in 2016, and certainly doomed once the court was packed with conservative Justices, as feminists have been warning for years. Although the outcome itself isn’t surprising, what is shocking for many Americans is the realization that the fall of Roe coupled with draconian legislation in many red states has opened up a new attack surface for abortion rights that didn’t exist pre-Roe: our digital lives.
While the American public at large is just realizing that their digital footprints will now be one of the primary sites for the battle for accessing abortions, anti-abortion activists have been expanding their arsenal of digital surveillance tools for years. Crisis pregnancy centres have been using geofencing to deliver ads to pregnant people in abortion clinics to “dissuade” them,
Data brokers already sell intimate data - not just from the apps on your phone, but browsing history, location data, purchases, all of which can be used to piece together extremely sensitive information, from whether you’re depressed to whether you want to get an abortion. They’re now selling a week’s worth of the location data of people who went to Planned Parenthood for $160:
“This is how you dox someone traveling across state lines for abortions—how you dox clinics providing this service.”
Location data like this will be extremely valuable to lawmakers and police looking to curtail the out-of-state travel for abortion services.
Beyond data brokers, big tech like Amazon or Google may be pressured to release user data to law enforcement looking to convict those who try to abort in states where abortion will be illegal.
Pregnant people who want an abortion now face potential scrutiny of and legal action from their online habits by law enforcement agencies, crisis pregnancy centres, and anti-abortion activists. But because of a draconian (and previously unconstitutional under Roe) law in Texas, that criminalizes “aiding and abetting abortion”, they also face the threat from those closest to them: family, acquaintances and even partners who want to remove their right to choose.
What will happen in Texas (and any other states who look to pass similar legislation) will be an enabling and emboldening of abusers. Domestic Violence victims are already increasingly digitally surveilled and controlled by their abusers. Reproductive coercion, which is the curtailing or removing of reproductive options for one partner by another, will increase. And abusers are incentivized by a cash payout for vigilante enforcing of abortion restrictions.
Abortion rights rest on the right to privacy in the US (because of how Roe was decided), but they are inextricable from it anywhere. The right to choose what happens to our bodies cannot survive without the right to control information about our bodies and our choices. Digital privacy will become a shared frontier for activists from the privacy and reproductive rights spheres going forward.
And because we apparently do have to say it: donate to your local abortion fund, NOT to an “abortion DAO”.
Monika’s Things
Crypto continues to be an utter mess, with many coins and NFTs in freefall and Bitcoiners really mad that people call it crypto. Meanwhile, scams using fake videos of Elon Musk continue to steal millions from unsuspecting users
An interesting essay on the ways that the Chinese government’s stranglehold over (social) media at home has prevented the export and mainstreaming of Chinese cultural products outside its borders
Reading Timnit Gebru’s rebuttal of the NYT piece that covered the firing of a Google Brain researcher who wanted to publish a criticism of a Nature paper submitted by fellow colleagues. The piece oddly connects his firing to Gebru’s, which is strange given what seems to have been a pattern of harassment from the fired researcher.
The last few years have seen an explosion in “mental health apps” of all kinds. From meditation to anxiety soothing exercises to apps supposedly helping replace therapists, the boom in the market has been remarkable. Apparently, so has the data harvesting and selling, according to Mozilla researchers. Data about people’s sensitive mental health conditions is routinely packaged and sold for targeted advertising when individuals are most vulnerable:
if you're wondering "where does data about my depression go?" the answer is brokers like this, where access to your eyeballs gets sold for $0.0025 USD* *($2.5 per thousand ad impressions / 1000 users = $0.0025 per user) skydeo.com/segment/adstra…“As a category, mental health apps have worse privacy protections for users than most other types of apps, according to a new analysis from researchers at Mozilla.” https://t.co/OOBhNYFapShypervisible farewell tour @hypervisibleThis is how Twitter’s soon to be released edit button looks. A reminder (as we mentioned in T3THICS Week 9 that disinformation researchers and engineers alike think an edit button is a supremely bad idea that will only lead to greater spam, not greater user satisfaction)
Reporters Without Borders/RSF released the 20th edition of the World Press Freedom Index and things don’t look great
A few weeks ago, longstanding feminist publication Bitch announced that due to funding issues it was shuttering for good. This piece by Samhita Mukhopadhyay looks at what it means to the media landscape for feminist publications to fold as attacks on women’s and LGBTQ rights increase
New paper by Abeba Birhane and coworkers looking at how harmful or offensive text data used to train AI should be considered and mitigated
Although photographing people in public is legal in much of the US, the distribution on social media of candid shots of people, especially with the intent to ridicule or demean, raises a new set of ethical questions. This essay explores the topic in more depth:
There is no escape from the internet today, because even if you decide to respect everyone’s privacy, there’s no guarantee that they will do the same for you. It’s legal to film other people in public, which means we’ve never really had the “right” to privacy in public spaces. But thanks to the proliferation of new technologies, such as smartphones and CCTV, we are now constantly haunted by the spectre of surveillance, which has a profoundly impoverishing effect on our own wellbeing and the culture at large.
In a story that was a Silicon Valley episode years ago, sensitive user data from Grindr (like exact user locations) was bought and sold through data brokers since at least 2017. Researchers have known this for a while and have been trying to warn us
Gizmodo drops another round of internal Facebook documents that cover newsfeed rankings, how algorithms promote or demote content submitted by users, and what it tries to quantify as “meaningful social interactions”
Meanwhile, competitors to Facebook/Meta continue to spring up
DefendDigitalMe published a snapshot of the state of biometrics in schools that exposes the relentless surveillance of kids
We stan the larger discussion of TETHICS in Protocol this week:
And last but not least, a Signal in the Noise tweet that looks at the potential unsustainability of the digital streaming model:
Marta’s Things
Tinder’s parent, Match Group is suing Google over Android in-app payment by being forced to use Google’s billing system and taking a cut. Google’s VP Government Affairs and Public Policy Wilson White published Google’s position here.
In an effort to bolster confidence in Shopify, it’s executives are publicly sharing their commitment by sharing their recent Shopify stock shares, including in memos to their own employees. Shopify’s stock has been been slumping since it’s record high during the pandemic.