Photo: Josefin / Unsplash

The last few weeks have been incredibly demoralizing, draining, and upsetting — particularly if you care at all about reproductive health and reproductive justice. The tumult kicked off with Politico publishing a leaked Supreme Court majority opinion draft earlier this month to dismantle Roe vs Wade. Within days of the Politico leaked draft, new legislation in different states started being passed to further combat and whittle away reproductive rights and gender affirming care in states like Louisiana and Idaho. Louisiana, for example, is seeking to criminalize in-vitro fertilization, classify abortion as a homicide, and criminalize other forms of birth control (including IUDs). As an IUD holding native New Orleanian, I find all of this particularly terrifying.

Because of the recent events, I noticed over the past few weeks how Twitter has been ablaze with recommendations to delete period tracking apps over concerns about how data is shared/not shared, and confusion over how concerned we should be in how period trackers could be used to criminalize individuals for abortions or birth control, or if we should be concerned at all about our period trackers. As a person who has a period, is data aware, and privacy focused, who doesn’t want children now but wants control over their own body (I mean, who doesn’t?), I thought I’d write a piece unpacking this– how concerned should we be about our period trackers being weaponized against us?

And the answer is: it’s kind of hard to say. Yet there are clearly many things to be concerned about right now. I’m a part of a few privacy and security communities, and this has been a topic of conversation over the past few weeks. The answer isn’t so much that period trackers leaking data is bad because it’ll be weaponized against you under new laws, and the overturning of Roe vs Wade.

Instead, the sad realization is that we live under so many forms of surveillance capitalism and that so many different vectors and platforms and creators of data can be weaponized against us, and that data can be easily, readily procured. For example, Motherboard has found over the past few weeks that data brokers are selling location data of people who visited Planned Parenthood, and other data firms are creating heat maps of where abortion clinic visitors live.

Journalist Shoshana Woodinsky pointed out how easy it is to use data from data brokers to find out where someone lives, what they’ve purchased on their credit card, including if someone is buying misoprostol, and if someone is visiting a clinic. Privacy journalist Kashmir Hill echoed this–that some of the biggest issues are not what people can learn about users from their period trackers, but generally the amount of information already readily available from data brokers available about individuals.

But there’s another, bigger issue related to prosecuting individuals for reproductive freedom, which is the police gaining access to our own devices. Kate Rose, a security expert on abortion access, pointed out that a big ongoing issue is device search and seizure from law enforcement; meaning that incriminating evidence about whether you’ve talked about an abortion, such as text messages, are on your device. Once seized, the police now have access to it.(As a side note, do not consent to searches of your phone!) And this has happened before with the police using data from people’s personal devices; this data was used as evidence in cases where people have been prosecuted for abortions. In those cases, things like email receipts for pills, search histories, and texts with trusted people were all used as evidence.

Look, period trackers are a concern, but it’s just one concern in a thorny web of many. A text message about crossing state lines, or a digital receipt of a bus ticket, or a slew of other information that can be taken from your phone are even more incriminating than an app tracking your flow.

It’s hard not to panic, especially after seeing threads like this, because this is the reality. Even miscarriages can be criminalized. Last week, when researching for this post, I was chatting with an activist friend about what people should be concerned about, outside of ::waves hands:: everything. Similar to how the doctor acted in the above thread, they pointed out a new and very realistic fear, and one of the things we should remember and fear the most, are doctors and nurses reporting on patients.

a thread by Janneke Parrish on her miscarriage

The bottom line is that we should care about, generally, how our apps bleed our data, without our knowledge or consent. We should always care about that. But in the case of reproductive justice and gender affirming care rights being eroded, one of the biggest threats we face are people in positions of power in institutions, like hospitals, schools, and our community, reporting on us to authorities, and how easily they will report on people and what kinds of lengths they will go to incriminate people affected by these new laws, along with how easily our personal data can be acquired.

So what can we do about the above? There are some things we can do right now: we can protest, donate to abortion funds, volunteer, and engage in mutual aid with our communities. We can also firm up our security on our devices, so we and our community can be safer. We can be mad, and stay mad, and keep fighting.

Some Resources for Y’all:

If you need security advice, here are some great resources from the Digital Defense Fund:
Abortion Privacy (Keeping Your Abortion Off Your Physical Phone) (I think this is a fantastic and robust one and you should all use it)

A Whole Page of Zines Digital Defense Fund Made on Privacy Topics (check them out!)

Reproductive Justice Action Collective (ReJAC)’s zine on emergency contraception), sex ed, birth control, and health resources in New Orleans. Plan B New Orleans Reproductive Health Zine

Gizmodo’s has two great articles out, one on how to get an abortion during the age of surveillance and 11 privacy tips for getting an abortion.

The Washington Post Has a Good Article on Your Privacy and Your DevicesYour Phone Could Reveal That You Had an Abortion

Wired Has a Good Guide to Protecting Your Privacy if Roe v Wade Fails: Wired Guide Here

The EFF has a great guide as to what companies can do to protect digital rights in a Post Roe world. They also have Surveillance Self Defense guides for people seeking or providing abortions.

If you’re looking for more privacy focused data apps, Yael Grauer of Consumer Reports has listed a few here on Twitter. Here’s Consumer Reports’ investigation on period apps and privacy.

Here’s a Period Tracker App that is Privacy Focused (recommended to be my a source from the Digital Defense Fund)

Here’s a great map of how the criminalization of reproductive autonomy functions by Verónica Bayetti Flores, Eesha Pandit,Mariame Kaba, and Andrea Ritchie.

A sobering and thorough history of what led up to this moment, and the Democrats failed to respond to and see this coming by Melissa Gira Grant.