Data brokers are multi-million dollar companies that we never hear of but that dominate the data market . They buy data from social networks, bankrupt platforms, credit cards, insurance companies, private clinics, point cards, mobile applications, smart appliances, electric cars, browsers and even Macedonian hackers. They buy the information and then repackage it in databases of behaviors , preferences, experiences and personal attributes, including sexual orientation, economic situation, religious alternative, political option, genetic diseases or mental disorders.
Ten years ago a catalog was leaked that one of those companies offered to the pharmaceutical industry. It included individuals with mental health problems and autoimmune diseases, women who had been victims of sexual abuse, and adolescents with suicidal ideation. Now that the constitutional right of women to abortion in the United States has disappeared, the databases of women who have gone to a family planning clinic to ask about contraceptive methods, ask for the morning after pill or legally terminate their pregnancy are increasing. in real time.
Vice magazine denounced the data broker SafeGraph for selling the location data of people who visited Planned Parenthood, the national network of reproductive health clinics in the US. It was real-time data, very useful for the kind of harassment that characterizes anti-abortion campaigns . But the supply of data can be projected in any direction. It can be retroactive, towards women who have already exercised their right when they still had it, with consequences that we cannot anticipate. Or it can be proactive and use a correlation of Google searches, phone calls, card payments, and menstrual cycle tracking apps to spot women who might try to travel to states that guarantee abortion rights.
The South Carolina Senate has introduced a law that prohibits offering or publishing information about places or ways to have legal abortions in other states or transport someone to another state with the intention of having an abortion. The law encourages any citizen to file a complaint. The data that the data brokers sell could constitute the necessary evidence to denounce the woman who tries to interrupt her pregnancy, but also to incriminate her taxi driver, her sister or her boyfriend. A geopositioning history would tell us where you live, where you shop and where you work. Valuable information when the purpose is to harass her to exhaustion.
The constitutional right to interrupt pregnancy during the first three months of gestation is just one of the many rights that the new sensitivity of North American justice could eliminate in the coming years, which could set a trend in other parts of the world. The data trading market is poised for many more pullbacks. Affinity Answers, the data partner of the giant Oracle, offers lists of people associated with Planned Parenthood and also with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) or the National Group of I work for the defense of Gays and Lesbians . If Lawrence v. Texas is annulled, in which the United States Supreme Court declared laws criminalizing homosexuality unconstitutional in June 2003, apps like Grindr or Tinder will have made their users the target of Internet surveillance. neighbors, relatives, teachers and colleagues. We must not wait for this to happen. The very existence of such databases is dangerous in a world where planes go everywhere but rights don’t.
