WASHINGTON – With Supreme Court ending constitutional protections for abortion, four Democratic lawmakers call on federal regulators to investigate Apple and Google for allegedly cheating millions of mobile phone users by allowing the collection and sale of their data personal to third parties.
Friday’s decision by the court’s conservative majority to overturn Roe v. Wade leads to a ban on abortion in about half of the states. Privacy experts say this could make women vulnerable because their personal data could be used to monitor pregnancies and share them with police or sell them to vigilantes. Online searches, vintage apps, fitness trackers, and advice helplines could become rich data sources for these surveillance efforts.
The request for an investigation into the two California tech giants came Friday in a letter to Federal Trade Commission chairwoman Lina Khan. It was signed by Democratic Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Cory Booker of New Jersey, and Rep. Sara Jacobs of California. He was sent shortly before the Supreme Court announced its decision to overturn the 1973 precedent and noted that the court would probably do so.
“People seeking abortions and other reproductive health services will be especially vulnerable to privacy harms, even through the collection and exchange of their location data,” lawmakers said in the letter. “Data brokers already sell, license, and share location information from people visiting abortion providers to anyone with a credit card.”
They said prosecutors in states where abortion becomes illegal could soon obtain orders to obtain information about the location of anyone who has visited an abortion provider.
“Private actors will also be encouraged by state rewards laws to hunt down women who have obtained or are seeking an abortion by accessing location information through shady data agents,” lawmakers wrote.
They asked Khan for an investigation into Apple and Google’s practices in mobile phone data in general. They accused companies of engaging in “unfair and misleading practices by allowing the collection and sale of hundreds of millions of personal data from mobile phone users.”
Lawmakers said companies knowingly “facilitated” harmful practices by creating location IDs used for advertising on their cell phone operating systems.
FTC spokesman Peter Kaplan confirmed the agency had received the letter, but said there would be no comment.
Apple and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The letter from lawmakers noted that Apple and Google now allow consumers to turn off data tracking. However, he said that until recently, Apple enabled the tracking ID by default and forced consumers to investigate the phone’s confusing settings to turn it off. Google still allows it by default, and until recently, it didn’t even offer consumers a deactivation, the letter said.
Last month, Wyden, Warren and Booker, along with Senators Edward Markey, D-Mass., And Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Urged Google and Apple CEOs to ban apps on the Google Play Store and Apple App Store. to use data mining practices that could facilitate the guidance of people seeking abortion services.