People in power want the information to identify a narrower set of people who may have been pregnant and then did not have a child and so may have had an abortion.
And facebook doesn't care about people's rights when those people in power are able to block Facebook from acquiring some new startup they want to buy, so facebook is willing to share the information.
Are we assuming the lack of a recorded period is the criteria? If yes, what if you just forgot to add it that month, or have hormonal issues, or abnormal BMI?
Texas & West Virginia is one of those states that prosecute women for having miscarriages. Texas offers a $10k bounty for turning in any woman who leaves the state and somehow returns without that pregnancy.
> Nationally, about 20% of pregnancies end in a loss, which includes miscarriage or spontaneous abortion, ectopic pregnancy, stillbirth or fetal death, according to federal data. Only a small number are investigated as crimes. But advocates say the growing number of laws in some states place people’s actions following pregnancy loss under greater scrutiny from law enforcement.
> Women in South Carolina, Georgia, Ohio, Arkansas, Texas, Mississippi, Oklahoma and several other states have faced criminal charges after a miscarriage or stillbirth for failing to seek immediate medical treatment, not pursuing prenatal care or disposing of the fetal remains in a way that law enforcement or prosecutors considered improper.
Many states prosecute black women who miscarry and one of their claims is that the woman took some (illegal - allegedly) drug that caused the miscarriage.
> In the year after the U.S. Supreme Court dismantled the constitutional right to abortion in June 2022, more than 200 pregnant women faced criminal charges for conduct associated with their pregnancy, pregnancy loss or birth, according to a new report.
When Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health first overturned long-standing precedent protecting a woman's fundamental right to abortion, pro-choice leaders issued warnings about the possibility of prosecuting women for abortions. These concerns were dismissed as hysterical or as political theatrics because, in the past, women were rarely prosecuted for their own abortions. This note analyzes the history of illegal abortion before the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade to demonstrate that women were targeted, used as leverage against abortion providers, and sometimes arrested for their roles in the procedure."
https://scholarship.law.slu.edu/lj/vol69/iss4/11/
Lots of reasons why you would miss a period that aren't pregnancy related. But that's not the point. Missing a period opens you up to further scrutiny and investigation by the state. Now they will start seeing if you've made out of town trips or perhaps subpoena your chat log to see what you've said to friends and family. It's not enough to prosecute, it is enough to start an investigation.
Is there any precedent of subpoena-ing chat logs, or locale information, based on (illegally obtained information of) a missed period; or is this Handmaid's-Tale-fantasy territory?
Does what actually happen? Prosecutions for abortions? Yes. Warrants related to people getting an abortion? Yes. A period tracker being used as the jump off point for those prosecutions/investigations? Hard to say, maybe? If the data is being sold it isn't hard to imagine that prosecutors and busybodies aren't currently mining that data.
mainly because I have no idea whether it's realistic to imagine what prosecutors do. I can also easily imagine it to be illegal and wildly unrealistic behaviour for a prosecutor, in my ignorance.
> Warrants related to people getting an abortion?
The question here isn't whether abortion is illegal in some states, but about period tracking data could be used as evidence, or justify an investigation - especially data that is seemingly illegally obtained. AFAIK, illegally obtained evidence is normally not valid grounds for investigation, and might actually weaken the case based on "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine.
In this case, though not covered by HIPAA, it's also not clear there was legal consent to sell this information given it was against their privacy policy.
The latter. Somebody in a town of dumbfucknowhere, OH wakes up, downloads this data from a commercial company obtained legally or not and then charges an actual person with getting an abortion. It is technically possible, I would factor it in my threat model if it was my problem, but does it actually happen?
I see a potential motive for the person doing this -- either promotion, quota hitting, number bullshitting or religious zeal. They can probably get something out it?
>People in power want the information to identify a narrower set of people who may have been pregnant and then did not have a child and so may have had an abortion.
And what will people in power do with this information?
Are you not American? We have literal abortion bounty programs[1] in some states. There is definitely a desire to find women who have had abortions and punish them for it.
Presumably try to get those women arrested, or at least investigate them.
It's actually quite difficult to investigate an abortion, though. Abortion isn't "real", in the sense that there's no obvious difference between a natural abortion (read: miscarriage) and a purposeful one.
The thing that means abortion abortion colloquially is the purposeful-ness of it. If you knowingly terminate a pregnancy, that's an abortion. If your body terminates its own pregnancy, for a variety of reasons because the human body is very complicated, that's not an abortion.
Generally trusting people with that nuance is, I think, asking for trouble.
Do you really have to ask that question? They've criminalized health care. There's motive, history and current events to explain what they'll do with this information.
If you stop having a period for a few months and then start again, it may be worth buying some location data during that time to see if you were near any medical offices that may have offered illegal abortion services.
Parallel construction like that is unambiguously fruit from the poison tree. It should never be allowed, and the fact that it is used routinely is one of the many ongoing travesties in the US.
My understanding is that it would be, if admitted to. That's where the parallel comes in: establish an evidentiary trail that's plausible enough to withstand defense scrutiny, and count on the court itself (ie, judge) not to dig any deeper.
That's the "parallel" part. They're using information that they aren't allowed to use but are constructing an alternate path to get to the same conclusion with information they could be allowed to use, even though they didn't.
Not sure why, but they did cooperate with the government on such matters
Facebook previously gave private Messenger chats to Nebraska police, these messages were used as key evidence to charge a mother and daughter over an alleged illegal abortion[1]
