16 ms·

With Roe overturned, period-tracking apps raise new worries

59 points by perihelions 4y ago

SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
We know however that it’s not period tracking apps that are often used for prosecution. It’s search history, call records, location data, texting.
- danuker 4y ago
  Somehow the apps stay free. But something must be paying the bills. The most straightforward way to do so is to monetize the data. As such, it might find its way to law enforcement.
- AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
  Period tracking apps haven't been used for prosecution yet, because abortion has been legal. There are now trigger laws in effect in some US states where having an abortion is punished by life imprisonment. The prosecutors in those states are no-doubt smacking their lips at the idea of using such data to find supporting evidence that a woman had a secret abortion.
  - Proven 4y ago
  - LocalH 4y ago
    I see it being even more grim. This ruling opens the door for any miscarriage past a state-specific threshold to be treated as a potential crime, meaning that they'll get to dig through all of the above. Then, any other crimes that may be discovered in the process will be prosecuted. Make no mistake, this is a power grab by egotistical religious nuts. They're not going to stop here.
    - tekknik 4y ago
      Where does one register as pregnant and check in with their pregnancy? What state has specifically outlawed miscarriages? It’s important to not spread fake FUD during these times.
      - LocalH 4y ago
        The devil is in the details. It's easy to find historical accounts of women who very nearly died, or actually died, because the doctors entrusted with their care either took too long to "approve" a medically necessary abortion, or flat out refused. There have been politicians bemoaning that ectopic fetuses have no "rights" and suggesting that they should be implanted into the uterus, which is currently impossible. The law on this topic, and people's behavior regarding it, is not driven by science, as it should be. It's driven by emotional religious blowback. I'm not a fan of elective abortions, but anything that could potentially put a roadblock in the way of a medically necessary abortion needs to be scrutinized very carefully. Women will die because of this decision at the end of the day. When that happens, the SCOTUS majority will have blood on their hands. Four justices are on record as having said they respected Roe v Wade as "settled law", and here they have shown that to be a lie. Why do we just allow these people to lie and get away with it? Any elected or appointed official who lies as part of their duties should be removed from office and blackballed from ever holding such office for the rest of their life. As well, Justice Thomas indicated that other privacy-based precedent should also be revisited. The Court seems to be trying to undo the whole concept of stare decisis.
      - wyatt_dolores 4y ago
        It's not FUD, man. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59214544 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59214544 Native American Brittney Poolaw was sentenced to 4 years in prison by Oklahoma in Nov 2021 for a miscarriage in a hospital. The court said her meth use constituted manslaughter, not drug addiction. If the mother smokes cigarettes, drinks alcohol, etc and a lawyer can show a reasonable expectation that this can harm a fetus and the mother can be reasonably expected to understand this risk and know doing so could harm her fetus, she could now be prosecuted for manslaughter in those states.
    - 4y ago
  - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
    Prosecutors have already prosecuted women for having abortions by crawling through searches and text messages. Someone who missed a period mysteriously doesn’t indicate an abortion. Someone who googles abortion clinics, then their location data is at the clinic, then they texted close family or friends for support about their decision to have an abortion, etc.
    - tekknik 4y ago
      > Prosecutors have already prosecuted women for having abortions by crawling through searches and text messages. This sounds illegal, have a link?
      - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
        Latice Fisher was arrested in 2018 under suspicions her miscarriage was an abortion, using her previous googling for abortion medication as evidence. She was later released, but my understanding is that her arrest in the first place was partially using search history as evidence. It’s totally legal if you have a warrant, and warrants are easy to acquire.
  - throw827474737 4y ago
    punished by life imprisonment, wow I thought we past those times here This step back and this presumed overvalueing of life what is a mere cell cluster vs being totally fine what is done to fully feeling empathic living beings every day is what boggles and saddens me a lot in our modern society (no not forbidding you to eat meat, just let them life a natural, or at least under some viewpoint a certain kind if happy and non-tortured life).
    - ModernMech 4y ago
      To unboggle your mind, look at it from the perspective of control over women rather than protection for the fetus. Claiming to value the life of the fetus costs you nothing and allows you to claim a moral high ground to control women. It’s as cynical a ploy as you can get.
  - tekknik 4y ago
    > There are now trigger laws in effect in some US states where having an abortion is punished by life imprisonment. Which states?
    - AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
      Texas: https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/24/texas-abortion-law-supreme-court-ruling/ https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/24/texas-abortion-law-s... https://www.findlaw.com/state/texas-law/texas-abortion-laws.html https://www.findlaw.com/state/texas-law/texas-abortion-laws.... Although re-reading the text, it's not clear whether that applies to the abortion provider or recipient.
      - tekknik 4y ago
        That’s the provider, not the patient.
perihelions 4y ago
Mirror if needed: https://web.archive.org/web/20220625115017/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/05/07/period-tracking-privacy/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220625115017/https://www.washi...
Proven 4y ago
rtp4me 4y ago
- heretogetout 4y ago
  I remember when we were accused of fear mongering when we said a right-wing Supreme Court would overturn Roe. We were told "it's the law of the land" or "they'll respect precedent".
  - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
    Yeah, too bad Obama was too afraid to codify it into law or even make it a priority... https://twitter.com/ManuclearBomb/status/1540368058165985281 https://twitter.com/ManuclearBomb/status/1540368058165985281 Listen, neither Republicans or Democrats care about life. I am proof, living homeless with a Bipolar Schizoaffective Disorder wanting to kill myself everyday because it just keeps getting harder and harder. And look at the ever growing amount of homeless. People care about money and themselves. That is the society we have created.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Obama only had 6 months (Jul 2009 to Dec 2009) where Democrats had a tenuous 60 votes to get something passed, and he chose to push healthcare reform. It is reasonable that he (and the other Democrats) not waste valuable limited political resources on abortion, which already was protected, and focus on healthcare reform.
      - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
        I am not talking about the circumstances. He said it was not a priority and it was "too controversial". That is weak. > not waste valuable limited political resources on abortion, which already was protected It was not protected, as we now see.
        lotsofpulp 4y ago
wesleywt 4y ago
A good question that will be answered in a few years. Will the pre-RoeVWade crime rates return to some American states. Rich women in abortion illegal states will still get abortions. Poor women won't.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  Some of them will be desperate enough. It just won't be safe anymore.
  - kingkawn 4y ago
    Alternatively I think that abortion access will improve in most red states because underground organizing will take off now that legal abortion has been banned. Unlike last time it was this way there are secure digital communication options that make autonomous logistics much more possible than in the past. Many red states had already reached near zero accessibility, and now there is massive attention and resources being poured into reaching women who were already de facto living under this new legal definition prior to its formalization.
    - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
      Underground abortion access is already a robust infrastructure in red states. Please don’t forget that abortion has already been heavily chipped away at, with only single digit clinics in massive red states like Texas.
      - kingkawn 4y ago
        Yes, nothing you added is in contradiction to or invalidates my statement, yet I shouldn’t “forget.”
  - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
    Serious question: Besides risk to ones life from natural child birth because of some health issue of the mother, why is it that woman are so desperate that they will risk dying by having a risky abortion rather than have a child?
jleyank 4y ago
If the data is online or on the servers of a company, it’s available to law enforcement. Any other thought is naive at best or just wrong. If one engages in obscure or (potentially) criminal actions, don’t use public, open communication media. And what is/isn’t criminal is changing. What was convenient before might be evidence tomorrow.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- yucky 4y ago
  100% this. The problem has nothing to do with Roe, it has to do with how we've allowed all of these technologies to violate our privacy on the off chance the information would never be abused, which is insane. Information is power, of course it will be abused by bad actors every single time.
noodlesUK 4y ago
A question I have for any US HN lawyers is: to what extent can states criminalize/apply civil penalties to extraterritorial actions? That is, can a state make it illegal for a person to have an abortion outside of the territory of that state? It used to be (and sometimes still is) that people would travel to GB from Ireland to receive abortions, but obviously a different legal system applies when it’s countries rather than states.
- dougmwne 4y ago
  I imagine they could try it. Arrest any pregnant woman attempting to cross state lines.
  - kingkawn 4y ago
    Pretty sure this is illegal but we need a hn lawyer to chime in
  - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  - tekknik 4y ago
    They could also try and make breathing illegal. You cannot stop anyone from crossing state lines.
    - yucky 4y ago
      Millions of people on probation or parole can not cross state lines..
      - tekknik 4y ago
        So criminals, but everyone else…. Grasping at straws.
- bonyt 4y ago
  "...as I see it, some of the other abortion-related legal questions raised by today's decision are not especially difficult as a constitutional matter. For example, may a State bar a resident of that State from traveling to another State to obtain an abortion? In my view, the answer is no based on the constitutional right to interstate travel." Slip Op. at 133 (Kavanaugh, J., Concurring). It's just a concurrence, but it seems to indicate that at least one conservative justice feels that states cannot criminalize that. For now.
jmyeet 4y ago
IMO there's an awful lot of ignorance about just how dire this situation really is. I see comments saying this sort of thing is fearmongering. It is not. Let me explain why. 1. To those who think this simply returns the issue to the states so it's not a big deal, take a piece of paper and write that down with the date on it and put it in a drawer. You can take it out when the GOP controls the White House, the House and the Senate and Federally bans abortion because there's no constitutional protection for it. 2. State laws are incredibly overreaching. Kavanaugh felt it necessary to explicitly call out that states can't ban interstate travel. Why? Because states are clearly trying to do that. And the Court may well change their mind on that later too. I mean they already did after saying under oath that Roe v. Wade and Case were super-precedents and settled law; 3. With psuedo-personhood for a fetus established expect women to be charged with endangering that fetus. This rlready happens. For example: an Alabama woman charged with manslaughter after getting shot and losing her unborn baby [1]; 4. Menstrual-trackng apps produce data that can be used in two ways. First, it could be subpoenaed by law enforcement to show that a woman was pregnant and may have had an abortion. Second, this data is sold to third-parties. The government already buys this data, which is currently a legal end-run around getting warrants. If you think that some state government won't do this too, you're out of your mind. Part of why people are legitimately worried is that this Court is completely psychotic. In the last 2 weeks we've had the Court decide: - A safe medical procedure is not consitutionally protected (and thus can be outlawed by states) because the word "abortion" isn't explicitly in the Constitution so it's supposedly a states rights issue; - The State of New York can't deny a concealed carry permit under its previous regime of demonstrating need; - The Border Tactical Force ("Bortac") can operate in a Constitution-free zone, including limiting Fourth Amendment protections, within 100 miles of any border, which means any coast, any border or any airport. This Constitution-free zone in fact covers two-thirds of the US population. The very idea of an originalist interpretation of the Constitution is a modern invention from the Nixon era to justify stripped people of their rights. The court is and always has been political. And now the Court is stacked with the politics of the Evangelical Taliban. Actually, that's not fair. Every Islamic country, including Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran, has more access to abortion that half the US states now do or soon will. [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48789836 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48789836
- 4y ago
simion314 4y ago
I am not from US so I have a question, can a state make abortion illegal and punish the women even if it was performed in a different state or country? Or is this a case where federal police/institutions need to be involved? If the answer is yes what you would need to do to renounce your state citizenship?
- kleinsch 4y ago
  States are trying. Move to another state and don’t go back.
- tekknik 4y ago
  No, a state cannot punish you for something you did in another state. To renounce your state citizenship (there is no such thing really, it’s called residence) you move and take an address in another state. After some time, usually 6 months, you now legally live in the new state.
worldshit 4y ago
can't the president pardon anyone who is criminalized about abortion?
- snthd 4y ago
  No, the president can only pardon federal crimes.
- sumeno 4y ago
  The president can only pardon federal crimes. The laws being broken are state laws.
zarriak 4y ago
I don’t think this is as big of a deal as people are presenting because I think there are already a lot of people who know you are pregnant from your data than period tracking. This makes me think of the story of Target[1] knowing when people were pregnant. I think there are a lot of other companies that it will come out are figuring out who is pregnant that will demonstrate the depth of surveillance of the surveillance economy. [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...
- mmastrac 4y ago
  The argument that it's not a big deal because you can also get arrested through all other sorts of invasive tracking isn't really that strong.
  - zarriak 4y ago
    There are just so many reasons for the period trackers to fight any potential data requests they receive and lots of other sources of data that can provide you close enough to the same data. I do think it is very important to specify because this is being presented as a false choice where the most important thing to do is to stop inputting data to your data into a period tracker app instead of the vast collection of all of your other data eg search and purchases. It is a false dichotomy where one of the few times people are consensually creating data is focused on instead of the vast amount of other data that most people would consider egregious to collect/collate.
- braldigg 4y ago
  > he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score Is not the same as a data broker selling data a user has self-reported about their ovulation.
snthd 4y ago
"Fitness" apps in general are going to be the same - eg data tracking that includes basal body temperature. F-droid.org is the obvious place to look for offline-by-default android alternatives.

59 points by perihelions 4y ago

We know however that it’s not period tracking apps that are often used for prosecution. It’s search history, call records, location data, texting.

danuker 4y ago
Somehow the apps stay free. But something must be paying the bills. The most straightforward way to do so is to monetize the data. As such, it might find its way to law enforcement.
AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
Period tracking apps haven't been used for prosecution yet, because abortion has been legal. There are now trigger laws in effect in some US states where having an abortion is punished by life imprisonment. The prosecutors in those states are no-doubt smacking their lips at the idea of using such data to find supporting evidence that a woman had a secret abortion.
- Proven 4y ago
- LocalH 4y ago
  I see it being even more grim. This ruling opens the door for any miscarriage past a state-specific threshold to be treated as a potential crime, meaning that they'll get to dig through all of the above. Then, any other crimes that may be discovered in the process will be prosecuted. Make no mistake, this is a power grab by egotistical religious nuts. They're not going to stop here.
  - tekknik 4y ago
    Where does one register as pregnant and check in with their pregnancy? What state has specifically outlawed miscarriages? It’s important to not spread fake FUD during these times.
    - LocalH 4y ago
      The devil is in the details. It's easy to find historical accounts of women who very nearly died, or actually died, because the doctors entrusted with their care either took too long to "approve" a medically necessary abortion, or flat out refused. There have been politicians bemoaning that ectopic fetuses have no "rights" and suggesting that they should be implanted into the uterus, which is currently impossible. The law on this topic, and people's behavior regarding it, is not driven by science, as it should be. It's driven by emotional religious blowback. I'm not a fan of elective abortions, but anything that could potentially put a roadblock in the way of a medically necessary abortion needs to be scrutinized very carefully. Women will die because of this decision at the end of the day. When that happens, the SCOTUS majority will have blood on their hands. Four justices are on record as having said they respected Roe v Wade as "settled law", and here they have shown that to be a lie. Why do we just allow these people to lie and get away with it? Any elected or appointed official who lies as part of their duties should be removed from office and blackballed from ever holding such office for the rest of their life. As well, Justice Thomas indicated that other privacy-based precedent should also be revisited. The Court seems to be trying to undo the whole concept of stare decisis.
    - wyatt_dolores 4y ago
      It's not FUD, man. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59214544 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59214544 Native American Brittney Poolaw was sentenced to 4 years in prison by Oklahoma in Nov 2021 for a miscarriage in a hospital. The court said her meth use constituted manslaughter, not drug addiction. If the mother smokes cigarettes, drinks alcohol, etc and a lawyer can show a reasonable expectation that this can harm a fetus and the mother can be reasonably expected to understand this risk and know doing so could harm her fetus, she could now be prosecuted for manslaughter in those states.
  - 4y ago
- SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
  Prosecutors have already prosecuted women for having abortions by crawling through searches and text messages. Someone who missed a period mysteriously doesn’t indicate an abortion. Someone who googles abortion clinics, then their location data is at the clinic, then they texted close family or friends for support about their decision to have an abortion, etc.
  - tekknik 4y ago
    > Prosecutors have already prosecuted women for having abortions by crawling through searches and text messages. This sounds illegal, have a link?
    - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
      Latice Fisher was arrested in 2018 under suspicions her miscarriage was an abortion, using her previous googling for abortion medication as evidence. She was later released, but my understanding is that her arrest in the first place was partially using search history as evidence. It’s totally legal if you have a warrant, and warrants are easy to acquire.
- throw827474737 4y ago
  punished by life imprisonment, wow I thought we past those times here This step back and this presumed overvalueing of life what is a mere cell cluster vs being totally fine what is done to fully feeling empathic living beings every day is what boggles and saddens me a lot in our modern society (no not forbidding you to eat meat, just let them life a natural, or at least under some viewpoint a certain kind if happy and non-tortured life).
  - ModernMech 4y ago
    To unboggle your mind, look at it from the perspective of control over women rather than protection for the fetus. Claiming to value the life of the fetus costs you nothing and allows you to claim a moral high ground to control women. It’s as cynical a ploy as you can get.
- tekknik 4y ago
  > There are now trigger laws in effect in some US states where having an abortion is punished by life imprisonment. Which states?
  - AdmiralAsshat 4y ago
    Texas: https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/24/texas-abortion-law-supreme-court-ruling/ https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06/24/texas-abortion-law-s... https://www.findlaw.com/state/texas-law/texas-abortion-laws.html https://www.findlaw.com/state/texas-law/texas-abortion-laws.... Although re-reading the text, it's not clear whether that applies to the abortion provider or recipient.
    - tekknik 4y ago
      That’s the provider, not the patient.

perihelions 4y ago

Mirror if needed: https://web.archive.org/web/20220625115017/https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/05/07/period-tracking-privacy/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220625115017/https://www.washi...

Proven 4y ago

rtp4me 4y ago

heretogetout 4y ago
I remember when we were accused of fear mongering when we said a right-wing Supreme Court would overturn Roe. We were told "it's the law of the land" or "they'll respect precedent".
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  Yeah, too bad Obama was too afraid to codify it into law or even make it a priority... https://twitter.com/ManuclearBomb/status/1540368058165985281 https://twitter.com/ManuclearBomb/status/1540368058165985281 Listen, neither Republicans or Democrats care about life. I am proof, living homeless with a Bipolar Schizoaffective Disorder wanting to kill myself everyday because it just keeps getting harder and harder. And look at the ever growing amount of homeless. People care about money and themselves. That is the society we have created.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Obama only had 6 months (Jul 2009 to Dec 2009) where Democrats had a tenuous 60 votes to get something passed, and he chose to push healthcare reform. It is reasonable that he (and the other Democrats) not waste valuable limited political resources on abortion, which already was protected, and focus on healthcare reform.
    - FollowingTheDao 4y ago
      I am not talking about the circumstances. He said it was not a priority and it was "too controversial". That is weak. > not waste valuable limited political resources on abortion, which already was protected It was not protected, as we now see.
      - lotsofpulp 4y ago

wesleywt 4y ago

A good question that will be answered in a few years. Will the pre-RoeVWade crime rates return to some American states. Rich women in abortion illegal states will still get abortions. Poor women won't.

rbanffy 4y ago
Some of them will be desperate enough. It just won't be safe anymore.
- kingkawn 4y ago
  Alternatively I think that abortion access will improve in most red states because underground organizing will take off now that legal abortion has been banned. Unlike last time it was this way there are secure digital communication options that make autonomous logistics much more possible than in the past. Many red states had already reached near zero accessibility, and now there is massive attention and resources being poured into reaching women who were already de facto living under this new legal definition prior to its formalization.
  - SamoyedFurFluff 4y ago
    Underground abortion access is already a robust infrastructure in red states. Please don’t forget that abortion has already been heavily chipped away at, with only single digit clinics in massive red states like Texas.
    - kingkawn 4y ago
      Yes, nothing you added is in contradiction to or invalidates my statement, yet I shouldn’t “forget.”
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago
  Serious question: Besides risk to ones life from natural child birth because of some health issue of the mother, why is it that woman are so desperate that they will risk dying by having a risky abortion rather than have a child?

jleyank 4y ago

If the data is online or on the servers of a company, it’s available to law enforcement. Any other thought is naive at best or just wrong. If one engages in obscure or (potentially) criminal actions, don’t use public, open communication media. And what is/isn’t criminal is changing. What was convenient before might be evidence tomorrow.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
yucky 4y ago
100% this. The problem has nothing to do with Roe, it has to do with how we've allowed all of these technologies to violate our privacy on the off chance the information would never be abused, which is insane. Information is power, of course it will be abused by bad actors every single time.

noodlesUK 4y ago

A question I have for any US HN lawyers is: to what extent can states criminalize/apply civil penalties to extraterritorial actions? That is, can a state make it illegal for a person to have an abortion outside of the territory of that state? It used to be (and sometimes still is) that people would travel to GB from Ireland to receive abortions, but obviously a different legal system applies when it’s countries rather than states.

dougmwne 4y ago
I imagine they could try it. Arrest any pregnant woman attempting to cross state lines.
- kingkawn 4y ago
  Pretty sure this is illegal but we need a hn lawyer to chime in
- FollowingTheDao 4y ago
- tekknik 4y ago
  They could also try and make breathing illegal. You cannot stop anyone from crossing state lines.
  - yucky 4y ago
    Millions of people on probation or parole can not cross state lines..
    - tekknik 4y ago
      So criminals, but everyone else…. Grasping at straws.
bonyt 4y ago
"...as I see it, some of the other abortion-related legal questions raised by today's decision are not especially difficult as a constitutional matter. For example, may a State bar a resident of that State from traveling to another State to obtain an abortion? In my view, the answer is no based on the constitutional right to interstate travel." Slip Op. at 133 (Kavanaugh, J., Concurring). It's just a concurrence, but it seems to indicate that at least one conservative justice feels that states cannot criminalize that. For now.

jmyeet 4y ago

IMO there's an awful lot of ignorance about just how dire this situation really is. I see comments saying this sort of thing is fearmongering. It is not. Let me explain why. 1. To those who think this simply returns the issue to the states so it's not a big deal, take a piece of paper and write that down with the date on it and put it in a drawer. You can take it out when the GOP controls the White House, the House and the Senate and Federally bans abortion because there's no constitutional protection for it. 2. State laws are incredibly overreaching. Kavanaugh felt it necessary to explicitly call out that states can't ban interstate travel. Why? Because states are clearly trying to do that. And the Court may well change their mind on that later too. I mean they already did after saying under oath that Roe v. Wade and Case were super-precedents and settled law; 3. With psuedo-personhood for a fetus established expect women to be charged with endangering that fetus. This rlready happens. For example: an Alabama woman charged with manslaughter after getting shot and losing her unborn baby [1]; 4. Menstrual-trackng apps produce data that can be used in two ways. First, it could be subpoenaed by law enforcement to show that a woman was pregnant and may have had an abortion. Second, this data is sold to third-parties. The government already buys this data, which is currently a legal end-run around getting warrants. If you think that some state government won't do this too, you're out of your mind. Part of why people are legitimately worried is that this Court is completely psychotic. In the last 2 weeks we've had the Court decide: - A safe medical procedure is not consitutionally protected (and thus can be outlawed by states) because the word "abortion" isn't explicitly in the Constitution so it's supposedly a states rights issue; - The State of New York can't deny a concealed carry permit under its previous regime of demonstrating need; - The Border Tactical Force ("Bortac") can operate in a Constitution-free zone, including limiting Fourth Amendment protections, within 100 miles of any border, which means any coast, any border or any airport. This Constitution-free zone in fact covers two-thirds of the US population. The very idea of an originalist interpretation of the Constitution is a modern invention from the Nixon era to justify stripped people of their rights. The court is and always has been political. And now the Court is stacked with the politics of the Evangelical Taliban. Actually, that's not fair. Every Islamic country, including Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Iran, has more access to abortion that half the US states now do or soon will. [1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48789836 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48789836

4y ago

simion314 4y ago

I am not from US so I have a question, can a state make abortion illegal and punish the women even if it was performed in a different state or country? Or is this a case where federal police/institutions need to be involved? If the answer is yes what you would need to do to renounce your state citizenship?

kleinsch 4y ago
States are trying. Move to another state and don’t go back.
tekknik 4y ago
No, a state cannot punish you for something you did in another state. To renounce your state citizenship (there is no such thing really, it’s called residence) you move and take an address in another state. After some time, usually 6 months, you now legally live in the new state.

worldshit 4y ago

can't the president pardon anyone who is criminalized about abortion?

snthd 4y ago
No, the president can only pardon federal crimes.
sumeno 4y ago
The president can only pardon federal crimes. The laws being broken are state laws.

zarriak 4y ago

I don’t think this is as big of a deal as people are presenting because I think there are already a lot of people who know you are pregnant from your data than period tracking. This makes me think of the story of Target[1] knowing when people were pregnant. I think there are a lot of other companies that it will come out are figuring out who is pregnant that will demonstrate the depth of surveillance of the surveillance economy. [1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-target-figured-out-a-teen-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-father-did/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/kashmirhill/2012/02/16/how-targ...

mmastrac 4y ago
The argument that it's not a big deal because you can also get arrested through all other sorts of invasive tracking isn't really that strong.
- zarriak 4y ago
  There are just so many reasons for the period trackers to fight any potential data requests they receive and lots of other sources of data that can provide you close enough to the same data. I do think it is very important to specify because this is being presented as a false choice where the most important thing to do is to stop inputting data to your data into a period tracker app instead of the vast collection of all of your other data eg search and purchases. It is a false dichotomy where one of the few times people are consensually creating data is focused on instead of the vast amount of other data that most people would consider egregious to collect/collate.
braldigg 4y ago
> he was able to identify about 25 products that, when analyzed together, allowed him to assign each shopper a “pregnancy prediction” score Is not the same as a data broker selling data a user has self-reported about their ovulation.

snthd 4y ago

"Fitness" apps in general are going to be the same - eg data tracking that includes basal body temperature. F-droid.org is the obvious place to look for offline-by-default android alternatives.