From the: white dudes office of “I have nothing to hide”, comes repercussions for women and others
The Business Insider (gross) headline: ‘Police are prosecuting abortion seekers using their digital data — and Facebook and Google help them do it’.
If you are shocked by this, then you’ve not been paying attention. Facebook and Google basically have to hand this data over, so I wouldn’t call it “helping”, so much as “complying”. Still, it’s clear this data does help these inhumane laws be enforced.
The best way around it for companies: don’t keep the fucking data. You cannot be compelled to supply data which does not exist (so far).
The real outrage here, for me, is not that these companies are handing over the data — again they have to — but rather that people using anything made by these companies are essentially now agreeing: being served better ads, is worth the tradeoff of women and, well honestly anyone not white and male, paying the price with their liberties and freedoms. That might sound a bit hyperbolic, but I am not sure that it is anymore:
However, as in the case of Burgess and her daughter, law enforcement requests may not be specifically looking for abortion-related data in their investigations, but may prosecute abortion-related crimes based on what they find.
Have hunch, get data, sort through it to find something they did wrong.
An investigation by ProPublica found online pharmacies that sell abortion medication such as mifepristone and misoprostol are sharing sensitive data, including users’ web addresses, relative location, and search data, with Google and other third-party sites — which allows the data to be recoverable through law-enforcement requests.
When the Snowden stuff came out — what seems like a life time ago — the common refrain was “so what, I have nothing to hide”. To anyone who could extrapolate the potential pitfalls of these systems, that was an obviously stupid statement. And it’s happening again, with people believing that they can trust these systems — but you cannot. You cannot trust these companies with your data, with your location, with your private conversations. They’ve shown no ability to actually protect and secure your data. They’ve shown very little care with it as well.
When Snowden released his information Roe v. Wade protected a woman’s right to healthcare. The tools were weaponized *against* ‘bad guys’. Today there’s no such healthcare protections for a wide swath of people in this country, but there’s active malice in enforcing draconian laws, and there’s knowledge by those seeking to punish/enforce of where the evidence lives and how to get it. It’s never been more dangerous for anyone who is not white and male to use Meta/Google and other services. And its never been more obvious that this is no longer a philosophical debate about whether this will be used against people for harm or not.
Stay private. Ditch that shit.
Or, I guess, agree that “it’s really easy to stay up to date with XYZ” is worth the attack on non-Christian-white-men-rights. It’s not like Google/Meta need to shut down, they simply need to change their ways to protect people.
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