Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse… Fucking republicans. Again.
“Anti-abortion activists have already used location data to send targeted anti-choice ads to women’s phones while they are sitting in abortion clinics,” the senators wrote in the letter. “Anti-abortion politicians in Republican-led states have placed bounties on women who receive abortions and doctors that provide them and even proposed laws that would punish pregnant people for traveling to seek abortions out of state. Anti-abortion prosecutors have used search and message data to criminally charge abortion-seekers.” (Emphasis added) (Huffington Post)
What many don’t realize is web pages and internet apps track what you do and report back to these data aggregators. Internet providers look over your shoulders. Some are facebook itself but many are all sorts of other cookie and tracking companies. There’s thousands of them. Web pages you visit literally spy on you and report. It’s a huge part of facebook’s business model and any page that has a facebook like button (or other services) pays big attention.
Most of the time this is just money hungry greedy business preying on the unsuspecting. “But I like seeing ads that interest me…” But now we are seeing these datasets used to arrest and charge people doing things they thought were in private. Unscrupulous data brokers are tipping the nazis off that you might not be a good obedient citizen.
It’s not perfect protection but goes a long way to stopping trackers - Pie Hole. (https://pi-hole.net)
Pie Hole runs on a Raspberry Pi and becomes a local DNS (domain name service) source. You can also look into DNS services like OpenDNS. These are your first lines of tracking defense. Pie Hole uses community-developed block lists to block known trackers. You can whitelist and blacklist as you see fit. If you don’t know what DNS is or why it and block lists can help, time to learn. Republicans are turning all the tracking and monitoring capabilities of the internet into tools to root out and harass/prosecute the rest of us.
From today’s Huffington Post…
Utterly terrifying. Why would ANY young women want to live in these states if this materializes? Will businesses move out of TX because smart people won’t live under such tyranny? Oh The Irony….
Even more on this phenomenon from AP…
https://apnews.com/article/abortion-us-supreme-court-technology-health-e9ee1642747b91a49069cf2110857cef
““The dangers of unfettered access to Americans’ personal data have never been more clear. Researching birth control online, updating a period-tracking app or bringing a phone to the doctor’s office could be used to track and prosecute women across the U.S.,” Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., said last week.”
“Until this month, anyone could buy a weekly trove of data on clients at more than 600 Planned Parenthood sites around the country for as little as $160, according to a recent Vice investigation that led one data broker to remove family planning centers from the customer “pattern” data it sells. The files included approximate patient addresses (down to the census block, derived from where their cellphones “sleep” at night), income brackets, time spent at the clinic, and the top places people stopped before and after their visits.”
““When abortion is criminalized, pregnancy outcomes are investigated,” said Tara Murtha, the communications director at the Women’s Law Project in Philadelphia, who recently co-authored a report on digital surveillance in the abortion sphere.”
Other methods to protect privacy would be to use a public computer (library, hotel, &c), and never take a cell phone to a place you don't want someone else to know about (the world was able to survive before the cell phone was invented).
I should also mention that other ways to help stop tracking are to use public wifi, tor, or vpn servers. There are still ways to track people and computers. Just the collection of stuff your browser reports about your computer’s capabilities and settings can uniquely identify most computers. There’s a website that will test everything your browser reports against other browsers who have submitted to the test - https://amiunique.org
If anyone starts getting nervous about aggregators, ISPs, or others watching what you do over your shoulder, be careful what your computer will reveal to them. Them turning to the internet to find people to go after for looking up abortion services is a very dangerous development and one that really needs privacy protection, but we won’t get that from this Supreme Court.
It‘s so oppressive. Republicans are attacking everything this country was built on.
You’re right, DeathOfRats. Nothing has been right. It’s like a switch was thrown to send us into a different reality.
Nothing has been ok with this timeline since Putin took a Dump in the WH.