Phone location data from people who visited abortion clinics, including Planned Parenthood, was legally on sale for $160, report says
Vice paid a broker $160 for a dataset that contained location data from Planned Parenthood branches.
This included location data from 600 Planned Parenthoods, some of which provided abortion services.
This poses a privacy risk to clinics and to people seeking abortions.
Companies that package and sell on people's phone data can legally sell on location data from abortion clinics, Vice reported.
Vice bought a dataset from a data brokering company called Safegraph. Data brokers are companies that collect people's personal data, assign it to specific profiles, then sell it on.
Vice bought a dataset from Safegraph for $160, which included a week's worth of phone location data for 600 Planned Parenthoods in the US. Not every Planned Parenthood provides abortion services but Vice reported that it verified some of the locations included in the dataset do.
While there are already privacy issues with sensitive location data being sold on by data brokers, Vice's report is especially concerning in the light of a leaked Supreme Court draft which shows the court could be poised to strike down Roe v. Wade.
If Roe v. Wade is overturned, abortion would likely become illegal in 23 states.
The data sold by data brokers like Safegraph is aggregated, meaning it doesn't single out individuals. However, it is possible to de-anonymize people from datasets provided by data brokers.
Cybersecurity researcher Zach Edwards told Vice that if Roe v. Wade is overturned, location data could be used to harrass people ravelling across state lines to access abortions, as well as the clinics who provide them.
"This is how you dox someone traveling across state lines for abortions — how you dox clinics providing this service," he said.
Doxxing is a form of harassment that involves revealing someone's identity and personal information.
Laura Lázaro Cabrera, a legal officer at nonprofit Privacy International, told Insider health information is particularly sensitive.
"Information about the provision of health services is health data, which is recognised by data protection systems around the world to warrant special protection and caution," said Cabrera.
"This, coupled with the fact that those seeking abortion care are often wrongly stigmatised, makes the sharing of their location data particularly concerning from both a privacy and safety standpoint," she added.
A Safegraph spokesperson told Insider that ahead of the Supreme Court's decision the company was "proactively limiting access to data on family planning businesses," and provided a link to a company blog post about the decision.
"We think this is the right decision given the current climate," Safegraph said in its blog post.
Planned Parenthood did not immediately respond when contacted by Insider outisde of usual US working hours.
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