8 ms·

Is it safe to keep using period and fertility apps in a post-roe America

34 points by mellavora 4y ago

mechanical_bear 4y ago
- the_only_law 4y ago
  Agreed, the government would never spy on it's own citizens and get away with it.
  - mechanical_bear 4y ago
    Sarcasm noted, but still this just reeks of a cheap attempt to rally the troops before Mid terms.
    - svrtknst 4y ago
      which implies that there is no risk of period tracking apps being subpoenaed or selling user data?
    - Arnt 4y ago
      That sounds likely, but if it's true and accurate, who cares whether it's also a cheap attempt to rally the troops?
- waynesonfire 4y ago
  lol right.. "Some men, like activist Santiago Mayer, have begun to sign up for accounts themselves in an attempt to distort the data." Santiago is reported as having three periods a month. A new normal some may ask?
- kadoban 4y ago
  Police forces are already buying data. Many apps like this exist pretty much solely to collect and sell data, and to throw you some ads. Why would you not expect police forces to purchase _this_ data?
- corrral 4y ago
  Would love to see your source that makes you confident these apps are secure against subpoena and/or simply buying access to the data and trawling through it.
- EB66 4y ago
  If you consider that anti-abortion groups have gone to the extreme effort of creating fake abortion clinics in order to ensnare unwitting women to divulge information about pregnancies they intend to terminate, then how is it "fear mongering nonsense" that the information in these fertility apps might be used for similar purposes? I could reasonably see those same groups creating their own app or buying an existing app and feeding the information to law enforcement that's willing to work with them.
  - waynesonfire 4y ago
    those are not "clinics" and certainly don't call themselves that otherwise they would be in huge troubles.
    - EB66 4y ago
      I wish you were right, but unfortunately it is a real thing: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/us/texas-abortion-human-coalition.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/us/texas-abortion-h... Their websites literally call themselves "[Location] Women's Clinic" and their tag line is something along the lines of "Take control. Start with a free abortion consultation today."
      - waynesonfire 4y ago
        Yeah, I guess you're right. Really pray on the vulnerable don't they. I wonder if they have to mention that they're not a medical practice during in-take.
        fknorangesite 4y ago
        > Really pray on the vulnerable don't they. Yup. Even in cases where they don't use "clinic" specifically, it's still something deliberately misleading. I used to live near a "Pregnancy Crisis Center" that was styled very much to look like a walk-in clinic; it was no such thing.
        throwaway5959 4y ago
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
  I agree. What do these apps collect that prove that a user received an abortion? Even location data pinning a user at a clinic doesn't prove anything. I have a question though- Do abortion clinics in other states have to comply with subpoenas?
  - Cyberdog 4y ago
    > What do these apps collect that prove that a user received an abortion? I'm skimming the article and yes, I don't see that mentioned anywhere, despite that being the lynchpin of the whole article. I suppose a pregnancy would throw off a woman's menstrual cycle, but so can many other things. No way that a mere scheduling change of a woman's period would hold up in court as evidence of an an illegal abortion. One of the interviewees also implies that states will start criminalizing miscarriage, which is just idiotic. Nobody involved in this article has actually thought these ideas through.
    - corrral 4y ago
      It's entirely plausible that a miscarriage might draw police or bounty-hunter scrutiny. Even if this doesn't lead to a prosecution—which is not guaranteed, since inappropriate and poorly-motivated prosecutions take place all the time—it's not exactly pleasant.
    - macintux 4y ago
      Miscarriages have been prosecuted even before this year. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59214544 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59214544
      - Cyberdog 4y ago
        Misleading headline. That woman induced the miscarriage by using hard drugs while pregnant - perhaps unintentionally, but it was still a consequence of her decisions. I of course was speaking of uninduced miscarriages, which happens shockingly often - one in four pregnancies, if my memory serves me correctly from the time it happened to me and my ex.
- basedgod 4y ago
  you are a either a blithering moron, or acting in bad faith few people are saying "the gestapo will literally be called to your house the second you miss a period in a red state" but rather, that this data can and will be used as collaborating evidence in a criminal trial. a state prosecuting an abortion will have to prove the person is actually pregnant, and there is zero reason to believe they wouldn't use this data as one more tool in their arsenal building a rock solid case. it's not as if people undergoing illegal abortions are going to have good records that can be looked up otherwise you are a bad person
  - mechanical_bear 4y ago
    Blithering moron? Bad person? I’m glad we are just jumping straight to the insults.
- papito 4y ago
  Before this, claiming that Roe was going to be completely rolled back was also "fear mongering nonsense".
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    Feels like the argument that people are overreacting will be made every step of the way. The last Roe thread had many posters claiming that the SCOTUS decision is fine because "it just leaves it up to the states" even though the clear, stated goal of Republican lawmakers is to ban abortion nationally. I can't tell if these arguments are being made in bad faith or it's just denial.
    - p_j_w 4y ago
      >I can't tell if these arguments are being made in bad faith or it's just denial. I think it's a combination of denial and an absurdly strong desire to be seen as "above the political fray." That or they're all auditioning for writers positions at The Atlantic.
    - papito 4y ago
      To be honest, there is a lot of this on HN. These are intelligent people. It really baffles me. "Yeah, we have a lot of evidence that the US form of government survived this time only due to a chain of extremely fortunate events, and the VP and some senators got nearly executed, but you are missing the bigger picture of history, stop freaking out". They said - without a hint of irony.
- mhh__ 4y ago
  In the same way that overturning Roe was fear mongering nonsense last year?
mattlondon 4y ago
I don't understand this. Let's do a thought experiment: say the speed limit in State X is 60mph. In State Y is it is 70mph. If you went to State Y and drove at 70mph there, will the police in State X arrest you when you come back because you went over 60mph, even though the claimed "offence" was in a different jurisdiction where it was totally legal? This whole thing about people having abortions where it is 100% legal (or even just - heaven forbid - tracking menstrual cycles) and then getting into trouble for it in places where abortion is not legal seems really weird. I can't believe it is being discussed in the US - this is like something out of Afghanistan.
- tessierashpool 4y ago
  it's exactly like stuff we've already done in the US, though. this is what it was like in the ramp-up to the Civil War, re slavery.
- ceejayoz 4y ago
  There's definitely precedent for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850
  - kmeisthax 4y ago
    Yes, but this and the Dred Scott decision backfired on the slaveowning South so badly that they, ironically, cried "states rights" for the next century or so.
  - zamadatix 4y ago
    When there is a federal law about it sure, plenty of precedence, but that's a very different case. Here there is no federal law one way or the other about the situation and it's unlikely the current congress would be able to pass such a law. This lack of federal stance is where the impact of the judicial ruling changing comes from.
  - fknorangesite 4y ago
    Why go back to 1850 when last week is far enough? Antiabortion lawmakers want to block patients from crossing state lines: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/29/abortion-state-lines/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/29/abortion-...
tessierashpool 4y ago
This is a serious thing that any app maker needs to plan for. Your work can be repurposed as surveillance, and the conditions for that can change in surprising ways. Apple does a pretty good job of taking this into account, minus their iCloud "back door," but they're almost the only big company that does this, and obviously a big part of that is a strategic opposition to both Google and Facebook. I could be wrong, but it seems to me like, after Apple, the only companies who even think about this are relatively small, privacy-focused companies like ProtonMail.
akomtu 4y ago
Looks like more people are going to realise the value of privacy.
Arubis 4y ago
Is the answer _definitively and future-safe_ "Yes"? It is not. Thus, no.
- usrn 4y ago
  Me and my girlfriend use period timing. We accept the risk because we would eventually like children, now wouldn't be ideal but wouldn't be catastrophic either. Both of us agree that regardless of the law we wouldn't get an abortion anyway. Risk isn't black and white, you have to actually measure things and not be ideological about it.
- Krisjohn 4y ago
  More broadly, it's not safe to store any digital data that an authority can _willfully misinterpret_ to use against you. Miscarriage? That's an abortion. Googling for a source of Methotrexate for your Lupus? Intent to supply abortion drug. Calendar entry for an Antifa protest that became violent? Intent. Time to start erasing your digital footprint.
legitster 4y ago
This.. seems like legal science fiction. Even if police were able to get a warrant and were willing to try taking a drink from the firehose of user data... it's hard to imagine they could glean anything useful that would meet evidence standards? Like how do you differentiate a pregnancy from a few months of inactivity? And how do you tie random usernames to real people? I get that you can theoretically connect the dots here, but it doesn't seem like a plausible concern. We do not already see courts filling up with police using app data to crack down on speeding drivers or underage drinking or other illegal activities.
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  This is from 2012 and uses much less sophisticated tracking than what happens on the internet: https://techland.time.com/2012/02/17/how-target-knew-a-high-school-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-parents/ https://techland.time.com/2012/02/17/how-target-knew-a-high-... The police don't have to do the work of correlating the data themselves. Would you stake your freedom on the idea that there's not a data broker somewhere buying up data and correlating it to create a "pregnancy score" for advertisers that might also be useful for law enforcement?
  - legitster 4y ago
    Okay, but there's a difference between Target throwing darts and accidentally hitting a target[sic] and legal grounds to press charges. I administer marketing systems for a living, and on a good day we hit 1 target out of a hundred. People really overestimate how sophisticated the data is. Police could have gone around buying phone books to look for parole jumpers - but the cost/benefit ratio on following up on every potential name would have been absurd. This would be a whole other magnitude above that.
    - AlexandrB 4y ago
      Perhaps I'm being cynical, but all it takes is an "expert witness" from the analytics firm in court saying that the chances the defendant was not pregnant are less than "1 in 10,000" or something. How good the technology actually is might not even matter to a jury considering the hype around ML and AI. > Police could have gone around buying phone books to look for parole jumpers - but the cost/benefit ratio would have been absurd. This would be a whole other magnitude above that. I'm not sure the cost will matter much when we're talking about an ideological crusade like this.
bilvar 4y ago
[flagged]
- corrral 4y ago
  It's not funny because they're very different things, so it's not necessarily contradictory to hold both positions. [EDIT] Incidentally, the position you call out isn't even one position, but a bunch of positions on multiple issues. Probably lots of folks held the position you don't like on some of them, and the one you do like, on others. "Made up strawman has contradictions" isn't insightful.
  - bilvar 4y ago
    It is contradictory and any mental gymnastics to prove otherwise are just moot. You are either against the government/politicians/bureaucrats/democratic majority dictating what you can do with your body and your private healthcare data or you are not. Everything else is just trying to convince (yourself mostly) that using authoritarian power to dictate to society what YOU like or YOUR ideological preferences is ok because "You are advocating for good things".
    - corrral 4y ago
      > It is contradictory It's not. You're comparing apples and oranges and declaring that you've spotted a "gotcha" that doesn't exist. > any mental gymnastics to prove otherwise are just moot. Glad to see you're open to considering that you might simply be wrong.
      - bilvar 4y ago
        Nope, same thing. Both sides want to use government to impose rules on other people's bodies and both are afraid the government will have a free lunch on harvesting data and target individuals through them. If you think one is justified and the other is not is the differentiating factor, its your own ideological/religious bias talking.

34 points by mellavora 4y ago

the_only_law 4y ago
Agreed, the government would never spy on it's own citizens and get away with it.
- mechanical_bear 4y ago
  Sarcasm noted, but still this just reeks of a cheap attempt to rally the troops before Mid terms.
  - svrtknst 4y ago
    which implies that there is no risk of period tracking apps being subpoenaed or selling user data?
  - Arnt 4y ago
    That sounds likely, but if it's true and accurate, who cares whether it's also a cheap attempt to rally the troops?
waynesonfire 4y ago
lol right.. "Some men, like activist Santiago Mayer, have begun to sign up for accounts themselves in an attempt to distort the data." Santiago is reported as having three periods a month. A new normal some may ask?
kadoban 4y ago
Police forces are already buying data. Many apps like this exist pretty much solely to collect and sell data, and to throw you some ads. Why would you not expect police forces to purchase _this_ data?
corrral 4y ago
Would love to see your source that makes you confident these apps are secure against subpoena and/or simply buying access to the data and trawling through it.
EB66 4y ago
If you consider that anti-abortion groups have gone to the extreme effort of creating fake abortion clinics in order to ensnare unwitting women to divulge information about pregnancies they intend to terminate, then how is it "fear mongering nonsense" that the information in these fertility apps might be used for similar purposes? I could reasonably see those same groups creating their own app or buying an existing app and feeding the information to law enforcement that's willing to work with them.
- waynesonfire 4y ago
  those are not "clinics" and certainly don't call themselves that otherwise they would be in huge troubles.
  - EB66 4y ago
    I wish you were right, but unfortunately it is a real thing: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/us/texas-abortion-human-coalition.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/us/texas-abortion-h... Their websites literally call themselves "[Location] Women's Clinic" and their tag line is something along the lines of "Take control. Start with a free abortion consultation today."
    - waynesonfire 4y ago
      Yeah, I guess you're right. Really pray on the vulnerable don't they. I wonder if they have to mention that they're not a medical practice during in-take.
      - fknorangesite 4y ago
        > Really pray on the vulnerable don't they. Yup. Even in cases where they don't use "clinic" specifically, it's still something deliberately misleading. I used to live near a "Pregnancy Crisis Center" that was styled very much to look like a walk-in clinic; it was no such thing.
      - throwaway5959 4y ago
2OEH8eoCRo0 4y ago
I agree. What do these apps collect that prove that a user received an abortion? Even location data pinning a user at a clinic doesn't prove anything. I have a question though- Do abortion clinics in other states have to comply with subpoenas?
- Cyberdog 4y ago
  > What do these apps collect that prove that a user received an abortion? I'm skimming the article and yes, I don't see that mentioned anywhere, despite that being the lynchpin of the whole article. I suppose a pregnancy would throw off a woman's menstrual cycle, but so can many other things. No way that a mere scheduling change of a woman's period would hold up in court as evidence of an an illegal abortion. One of the interviewees also implies that states will start criminalizing miscarriage, which is just idiotic. Nobody involved in this article has actually thought these ideas through.
  - corrral 4y ago
    It's entirely plausible that a miscarriage might draw police or bounty-hunter scrutiny. Even if this doesn't lead to a prosecution—which is not guaranteed, since inappropriate and poorly-motivated prosecutions take place all the time—it's not exactly pleasant.
  - macintux 4y ago
    Miscarriages have been prosecuted even before this year. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59214544 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-59214544
    - Cyberdog 4y ago
      Misleading headline. That woman induced the miscarriage by using hard drugs while pregnant - perhaps unintentionally, but it was still a consequence of her decisions. I of course was speaking of uninduced miscarriages, which happens shockingly often - one in four pregnancies, if my memory serves me correctly from the time it happened to me and my ex.
basedgod 4y ago
you are a either a blithering moron, or acting in bad faith few people are saying "the gestapo will literally be called to your house the second you miss a period in a red state" but rather, that this data can and will be used as collaborating evidence in a criminal trial. a state prosecuting an abortion will have to prove the person is actually pregnant, and there is zero reason to believe they wouldn't use this data as one more tool in their arsenal building a rock solid case. it's not as if people undergoing illegal abortions are going to have good records that can be looked up otherwise you are a bad person
- mechanical_bear 4y ago
  Blithering moron? Bad person? I’m glad we are just jumping straight to the insults.
papito 4y ago
Before this, claiming that Roe was going to be completely rolled back was also "fear mongering nonsense".
- AlexandrB 4y ago
  Feels like the argument that people are overreacting will be made every step of the way. The last Roe thread had many posters claiming that the SCOTUS decision is fine because "it just leaves it up to the states" even though the clear, stated goal of Republican lawmakers is to ban abortion nationally. I can't tell if these arguments are being made in bad faith or it's just denial.
  - p_j_w 4y ago
    >I can't tell if these arguments are being made in bad faith or it's just denial. I think it's a combination of denial and an absurdly strong desire to be seen as "above the political fray." That or they're all auditioning for writers positions at The Atlantic.
  - papito 4y ago
    To be honest, there is a lot of this on HN. These are intelligent people. It really baffles me. "Yeah, we have a lot of evidence that the US form of government survived this time only due to a chain of extremely fortunate events, and the VP and some senators got nearly executed, but you are missing the bigger picture of history, stop freaking out". They said - without a hint of irony.
mhh__ 4y ago
In the same way that overturning Roe was fear mongering nonsense last year?

I don't understand this. Let's do a thought experiment: say the speed limit in State X is 60mph. In State Y is it is 70mph. If you went to State Y and drove at 70mph there, will the police in State X arrest you when you come back because you went over 60mph, even though the claimed "offence" was in a different jurisdiction where it was totally legal? This whole thing about people having abortions where it is 100% legal (or even just - heaven forbid - tracking menstrual cycles) and then getting into trouble for it in places where abortion is not legal seems really weird. I can't believe it is being discussed in the US - this is like something out of Afghanistan.

tessierashpool 4y ago
it's exactly like stuff we've already done in the US, though. this is what it was like in the ramp-up to the Civil War, re slavery.
ceejayoz 4y ago
There's definitely precedent for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fugitive_Slave_Act_of_1850
- kmeisthax 4y ago
  Yes, but this and the Dred Scott decision backfired on the slaveowning South so badly that they, ironically, cried "states rights" for the next century or so.
- zamadatix 4y ago
  When there is a federal law about it sure, plenty of precedence, but that's a very different case. Here there is no federal law one way or the other about the situation and it's unlikely the current congress would be able to pass such a law. This lack of federal stance is where the impact of the judicial ruling changing comes from.
- fknorangesite 4y ago
  Why go back to 1850 when last week is far enough? Antiabortion lawmakers want to block patients from crossing state lines: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/29/abortion-state-lines/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/29/abortion-...

tessierashpool 4y ago

This is a serious thing that any app maker needs to plan for. Your work can be repurposed as surveillance, and the conditions for that can change in surprising ways. Apple does a pretty good job of taking this into account, minus their iCloud "back door," but they're almost the only big company that does this, and obviously a big part of that is a strategic opposition to both Google and Facebook. I could be wrong, but it seems to me like, after Apple, the only companies who even think about this are relatively small, privacy-focused companies like ProtonMail.

akomtu 4y ago

Looks like more people are going to realise the value of privacy.

Arubis 4y ago

Is the answer _definitively and future-safe_ "Yes"? It is not. Thus, no.

usrn 4y ago
Me and my girlfriend use period timing. We accept the risk because we would eventually like children, now wouldn't be ideal but wouldn't be catastrophic either. Both of us agree that regardless of the law we wouldn't get an abortion anyway. Risk isn't black and white, you have to actually measure things and not be ideological about it.
Krisjohn 4y ago
More broadly, it's not safe to store any digital data that an authority can _willfully misinterpret_ to use against you. Miscarriage? That's an abortion. Googling for a source of Methotrexate for your Lupus? Intent to supply abortion drug. Calendar entry for an Antifa protest that became violent? Intent. Time to start erasing your digital footprint.

legitster 4y ago

This.. seems like legal science fiction. Even if police were able to get a warrant and were willing to try taking a drink from the firehose of user data... it's hard to imagine they could glean anything useful that would meet evidence standards? Like how do you differentiate a pregnancy from a few months of inactivity? And how do you tie random usernames to real people? I get that you can theoretically connect the dots here, but it doesn't seem like a plausible concern. We do not already see courts filling up with police using app data to crack down on speeding drivers or underage drinking or other illegal activities.

AlexandrB 4y ago
This is from 2012 and uses much less sophisticated tracking than what happens on the internet: https://techland.time.com/2012/02/17/how-target-knew-a-high-school-girl-was-pregnant-before-her-parents/ https://techland.time.com/2012/02/17/how-target-knew-a-high-... The police don't have to do the work of correlating the data themselves. Would you stake your freedom on the idea that there's not a data broker somewhere buying up data and correlating it to create a "pregnancy score" for advertisers that might also be useful for law enforcement?
- legitster 4y ago
  Okay, but there's a difference between Target throwing darts and accidentally hitting a target[sic] and legal grounds to press charges. I administer marketing systems for a living, and on a good day we hit 1 target out of a hundred. People really overestimate how sophisticated the data is. Police could have gone around buying phone books to look for parole jumpers - but the cost/benefit ratio on following up on every potential name would have been absurd. This would be a whole other magnitude above that.
  - AlexandrB 4y ago
    Perhaps I'm being cynical, but all it takes is an "expert witness" from the analytics firm in court saying that the chances the defendant was not pregnant are less than "1 in 10,000" or something. How good the technology actually is might not even matter to a jury considering the hype around ML and AI. > Police could have gone around buying phone books to look for parole jumpers - but the cost/benefit ratio would have been absurd. This would be a whole other magnitude above that. I'm not sure the cost will matter much when we're talking about an ideological crusade like this.

bilvar 4y ago

[flagged]

corrral 4y ago
It's not funny because they're very different things, so it's not necessarily contradictory to hold both positions. [EDIT] Incidentally, the position you call out isn't even one position, but a bunch of positions on multiple issues. Probably lots of folks held the position you don't like on some of them, and the one you do like, on others. "Made up strawman has contradictions" isn't insightful.
- bilvar 4y ago
  It is contradictory and any mental gymnastics to prove otherwise are just moot. You are either against the government/politicians/bureaucrats/democratic majority dictating what you can do with your body and your private healthcare data or you are not. Everything else is just trying to convince (yourself mostly) that using authoritarian power to dictate to society what YOU like or YOUR ideological preferences is ok because "You are advocating for good things".
  - corrral 4y ago
    > It is contradictory It's not. You're comparing apples and oranges and declaring that you've spotted a "gotcha" that doesn't exist. > any mental gymnastics to prove otherwise are just moot. Glad to see you're open to considering that you might simply be wrong.
    - bilvar 4y ago
      Nope, same thing. Both sides want to use government to impose rules on other people's bodies and both are afraid the government will have a free lunch on harvesting data and target individuals through them. If you think one is justified and the other is not is the differentiating factor, its your own ideological/religious bias talking.