America's tech giants have a new responsibility in the post-Roe world

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The Supreme Court’s 6 to 3 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade has raised disturbing questions for U.S. consumers seeking abortions online or even researching them.

Could authorities subpoena information from online activity related to abortions? What about workers at major tech firms? Could they gain inappropriate access to users’ reproductive data? What about a Texas women who receives an abortion in New York, where the practice is legal? Could her online data be used against her in Texas?

The answers, experts say, are still unknown.

“It's all uncharted territory,” Alexandra Givens, president and CEO of The Center for Democracy & Technology, told Yahoo Finance. “The concern is that Texas would enforce ... a long arm statute so that they could go after people even for getting abortion services outside of the state.”

To help women seeking abortions, she said, tech companies of all sizes need to reevaluate the data they collect — and consider encrypting it if they don’t already. After all, if data can be used for targeted advertising, it’s not too large of a leap to imagine law enforcement using that same information to prosecute women for having abortions.

Tech companies can be compelled to turn over data

Technology companies ranging from Google-parent Alphabet (GOOG, GOOGL) to Facebook-parent Meta (META) to Microsoft (MSFT) and Apple (AAPL) frequently receive government requests for user data. In many instances, those companies reject the requests as overly broad even if they meet legal requirements.

“They have ways of pushing back, standing up, trying to slow the process down and just showing that they're not going to just roll over and hand over information without a fight,” explained Riana Pfefferkorn, a research scholar at Stanford University’s Internet Observatory.