When the Covid-19 pandemic shuttered businesses and government buildings – driving school children, non-essential workers, and consumers into isolation – millions of Americans scrambled for ways to resume their everyday activities. As restrictions eased, but before the vaccine became a healthcare game-changer, millions signed up for exposure notifications via their cell phones. Persons using these apps received an alert if they strayed into the vicinity of a phone belonging to a person who had recently tested positive for the illness.
Data mining sites aggregated that information – location tracking information was coupled with millions of data points about healthcare – and packaged it for sale. Palantir Technologies, Inc., owned by far-right political influencer Peter Thiel, sold the machine-assisted, human-driven data to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and these agencies used the data to deport individuals and separate families.
With the 2024 election just two weeks away, JD Vance – the candidate whose 2022 U.S. Senate campaign Thiel bankrolled – is on the ballot for vice president. The election of Vance, who supports a national abortion ban, would pave the way for Palantir to aggregate information on the menstrual cycles and the physical locations of persons who could become pregnant and then sell that information to federal, state and local law enforcement.
Tara Murtha, Director of Impact and Engagement for the Women’s Law Project, warns that it isn’t necessary for a consumer to download an app. She adds that even a passive web search for reproductive health information can become one of those aggregated data points. “It’s a lot broader than period trackers. A 12-year-old curious for answers could look online, surrendering personal information or be engaged by a chat bot.”
Deepak Puri, a Silicon Valley executive turned political watchdog, explained to Bucks County Beacon that if right-wing candidates prevail and abortion remains illegal in some, or expands to each of the states, all types of surveillance information “turns to gold” for data miners like Thiel.
Think of the Texas abortion bounty hunter law on steroids. Instead of a $10,000 purse for each woman successfully nabbed by a bounty hunter and brought to court, there’d be more than 63 million women of childbearing age that a corporation like Palantir could surveil and report to the authorities.
Simplifying numbers, Puri created estimated revenues based on 50 million persons of childbearing age. “For example, Palantir could charge $1 per month to track each person … that’s potentially $50 million dollars a month, to turn over data to the government.” $50 million a month is $600 million a year, right in line with what the U.S. is already paying for Palantir’s Maven Smart System used by the U.S. Military.
Incidentally, Maven is a way to make intelligence gathering – spying on our enemies – more successful by augmenting the information collected by humans with massive electronic information gathering. Period tracking, combined with geolocating, turns that ability to process virtually limitless bits of information against American women and girls.
READ: JD Vance, Menstrual Surveillance Hawk
Puri can’t stress strongly enough that all forms of aggregated data coupled with information gleaned from mapping programs used in simple navigation and location apps – like the ones used during Covid-19 – will put “your personal, vital information into the hands of a right-wing company that is beholden to the government.”
Conversely, Puri emphasizes that a Harris/Walz win, coupled with the down ballot election of pro-choice candidates could stop the period tracking movement and cost tech billionaires (like Thiel and his buddy, Elon Musk, who has been campaigning for the Trump/Vance ticket in Pennsylvania) enormous sums of money. Puri believes that’s why billionaires are pushing the Trump/Vance ticket. Proving his point, Musk campaigned with Dave McCormick this past weekend and is giving a million dollars a day to individuals randomly selected who have signed Musk’s petition.
“Always follow the money. When a billionaire is giving $45 million to JD Vance… it’s a fair question to ask, why are they doing it?” After posing his question, Puri answered it, “I don’t think they value their beliefs that much. I think it’s the money, number one. And number two: the power. Whoever controls the data can influence a lot of stuff.”
Puri’s website Democracy Labs is a clearing house of information aimed at exposing the ulterior motives of the data analytics moguls. He knows that when lawmakers like Harris/Walz pledge to restore Roe and/or enshrine reproductive healthcare rights nationwide, Thiel and Musk fight hammer and tongs for their Republican opponents. For that reason, Puri’s doing everything in his power to alert voters about the threat to their autonomy and their rights.
Delaware County State Representative Leanne Kreuger echoes the tech mogul’s siren call to understand what’s at stake and encourage citizens to vote. Kreuger explains, “What I’ve been saying to people is that our right to privacy is on the ballot this year.” And not just privacy, but what you do in that private space. Kreuger continued, “When I go to vote this year, reproductive rights will be top of mind. Our right to birth-control as well as our right to IVF is on the ballot this year.”
Dickinson College Associate Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Katie Oliviero, is on the front line studying the intersection of law enforcement and women’s rights. “This [monitoring of women] is both very old and ground-breaking because of the way technology works. It has new and very scary implications.” Oliviero cautions that a person’s healthcare provider can’t protect them. “Apps don’t have robust HIPPA protections.”
Data miners aggregating information stored on period trackers could alert local authorities when a person’s period stops – potentially due to a pregnancy – and again when it resumes. If a sheriff or district attorney suspects an illegal abortion was obtained; this data could trigger a subpoena for the person’s health records. The professor cautioned that precedence set in the Supreme Court’s 1992 decision, Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, could allow for abortion records to be subpoenaed by law enforcement – even across state lines.
Oliviero watched women’s rights erode even before 2022, when Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health overturned Roe v. Wade. The professor cites the Supreme Court’s decision to terminate Roe as just one step in a long process. Oliviero’s watched wrongful death, fetal death, and fetal endangerment cases gain traction for more than a decade.
READ: Inside the MAGA Plan to Attack Birth Control, Surveil Women and Ban the Abortion Pill
For example, Marshae Jones, a Black woman, was initially charged with murder and attempted murder after being shot in the stomach following an argument with another woman. Prosecutors claimed in 2019 – three years before the Dobbs decision – that Jones started the disagreement that led to the shooting. A police spokesman at the time claimed, “The investigation showed that the only true victim in this was the unborn baby.’’
Charges hung over Jones for six months, until Lynneice Washington, the Jefferson County district attorney, exercised her prerogative and dropped the charges.
Oliviero says that women like Jones are the “canary in the coal mine” and that the overall health of women’s rights can be predicted by how marginalized women are treated. “It is particularly important at the intersection of gender and race… that we look historically at the denial of rights to women of color.”
When asked how data analytics could further exacerbate restrictions on reproductive rights, Oliveiro cited the rapidly growing numbers of abortions (4 out of 5) that are now a result of telemedicine. Lawmakers have changed their focus and in the process of outlawing abortion of any kind, they may change who they target with criminal prosecution. “There’s always been a concern where abortion is illegal that punishment would shift from people who performed them to those who received them.”
Oliviero used this example, “A woman from Mississippi has a telehealth appointment with a Connecticut practitioner who prescribes a medication abortion.” If she lives in a state where fetuses and fertilized eggs are considered children, and her period data has been sold to the local sheriff’s department, she may face a charge of murder.
And while – in the case of Oliviero’s hypothetical – Connecticut has new shield legislation that protects the practitioner from prosecution by out-of-state law enforcement, that would not protect the woman in Mississippi if that state starts prosecuting women.
Rep. Kreuger has been proposing or co-sponsoring legislation to protect providers and their patients in Pennsylvania – including a shield law HB1786 similar to the one in Connecticut. Much of it has bipartisan support and several proposed laws have been passed in the house. Even Kreuger’s HB1140, which merely expands access to contraceptives, is stalled in the Senate. Kreuger explains, “Senate Republican leadership is holding them up.”
The Women’s Law Project’s Murtha declined to recommend how anyone should vote, but agrees that the upcoming election is crucial. “The anti-abortion movement has been unabashed about their attempt to grab personal data. If people care about their own and their family’s privacy, they need to vote accordingly.”
