See Mark’s talk “Predators – How to tell someone had an abortion from data flows” at 4:55 pm on Saturday, November 12, 2022
Anti-abortion laws promoting bounty hunting are enabling a new profitable industry using fusion of reproductive, behavioral and travel information to target providers of reproductive services.
Data brokers currently supply geolocation data, collected by innocuous-seeming phone apps, and also collect demographic and purchasing data.
License plate readers are cheap, available, and unregulated for private use, and brokers sell vehicle license plate sightings, some from local government “sharing,” to reduce their expense.
Now data brokers can freely expand into pregnancy-specific data, sell such newly-valuable data to bounty hunters, facilitating investigating what became of that fetus and hounding people they suspect of having aided in an abortion to pay to settle a civil case filed against them, and without a “double-indemnity” style limit which would prevent multiple such suits.
Snitches and data breaches (on period tracker apps, health care providers, or insurance companies) can be used for improving targeting quality.