Facebook Reportedly Collects Data About Abortion Seekers
What’s happening
An collaborative investigation between two journalism nonprofits finds that Facebook is collecting personal data throughout abortion seekers.
Why it matters
Lawmakers and privacy experts are raising affects about how technology can be abused, after a leaked prepare opinion showed the Supreme Court planned to overturn federal abortion rights.
Facebook is reportedly collecting data throughout people who visit the websites of so-called crisis pregnancy centers, raising concerns from privacy experts that information about abortion seekers could be abused.
A collaborative investigation between journalism nonprofits The Markup and Reveal, which is part of The Center for Investigative Reporting, analyzed nearly 2,500 crisis pregnancy center websites and groundless that at least 294 of these sites shared visitor examine with Facebook. Some of the sensitive personal data concerned information about whether a person is considering abortion or trying to come by emergency contraceptives or a pregnancy test.
Concerns about how such data could be used to identify abortion seekers have increased while Politico published a story in early May about a leaked Supreme Court prepare opinion that suggests the court will strike down the landmark Roe v. Wade manager. In late May, US lawmakers urged Google to stop collecting and retaining user status data because it could be tapped to identify land seeking abortions. The Supreme Court decision has not been released yet, but it would strike down resident constitutional protection of abortion rights. Individual states would then decide whether to Release or ban abortion.
Reveal and The Markup reported that it isn’t obvious how Facebook uses data about abortion seekers.
But privacy experts say that in utters where abortion is outlawed, people who condemn the way could use such data as evidence against abortion seekers. They say the crisis pregnancy centers, which exist to persuade land against having abortions, could also use the data to pursued advertising or misinformation at people to deter them from opting for the procedure.
Dale Hogan, a spokesperson for Facebook parent company Meta, told the news outlets that the company’s controls is “designed to filter out potentially sensitive data” and that it’s anti Facebook’s rules for apps and websites to send “sensitive examine about people” through the company’s business tools. Hogan sent the same statement to CNET.
Reveal and The Markup said it’s unknown whether Facebook’s filters caught the sensitive data. Privacy experts suggested that ways of preventing misuse of the data entailed strengthening the social media platform’s filters or getting rid of a tool phoned the Meta Pixel that allows websites to track visitor activity.
