The conservative-majority Supreme Court’s revocation of the constitutional right to abortion last year wrought terror across the nation.
The post-Roe v. Wade world, in which some states are pursuing draconian punishments for a safe and often essential medical procedure, is littered with legal land mines and tripwires to punish those who dare undergo or provide an abortion.
Some Republican-backed measures seek to punish those who leave the state for abortion care in a place where the procedure is legal.
As I’ve written in the past, the overturning of Roe. v. Wade thrust the country into a new era of government surveillance as states wield the authority to subpoena people’s private information and online exchanges to prove they received or planned to receive an illegal abortion — or if they helped someone do so.
So more than ever, the potential for data to fall into the wrong hands — anti-abortion zealots, perhaps — is a real and frightening possibility.
That’s why Wednesday’s statement from the Federal Trade Commission announcing its settlement with Premom, a popular ovulation tracking app, is so disturbing.
According to the FTC‘s press release:
The Federal Trade Commission charged that the developer of the fertility app Premom deceived users by sharing their sensitive personal information with third parties, including two China-based firms, disclosed users’ sensitive health data to AppsFlyer and Google, and failed to notify consumers of these unauthorized disclosures in violation of the Health Breach Notification Rule (HBNR).
Premom “encourages users to provide information about their menstrual cycles, fertility, and pregnancy as well as to import their data from other apps such as Apple Health,” the FTC said.
The app shared users’ “precise geolocation information” as well as their social media and mobile device data with third parties, including the two China-based companies, according to the FTC.
As part of the settlement agreement, the app’s owner, Easy Healthcare, wasn’t required to admit wrongdoing. And a carefully worded statement posted on Premom’s website on Wednesday offers their take on the situation (italics are mine):
“Rest assured that we do not, and will not, ever sell any information about users’ health to third parties, nor do we share it for advertising purposes.”
Nonetheless, the FTC hit Easy Healthcare with a $200,000 settlement fee, barred the company from sharing health data for advertising purposes, required the company to obtain user consent before sharing personal health data with third parties, and required the company to seek the deletion of user data it shared.
Lol, good luck to them with that.
But in all seriousness: Good luck to anyone having to navigate this treacherous new post-Roe world filled with high-tech traps.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.