After the leak of the US supreme court draft that might overturn the rights of women and people with uteruses to get an abortion in USA, social media is buzz with how data from period tracking apps can be weaponized against these people. With Covid-19 we also ceded lot of authority to government and even private firms to track even more personal data about us. In my discussions with even people working in Tech and digital native folks, lot of them will always come up a with a counter that I am not doing anything wrong, why should I be worried even if someone can track my data. Many also say they don’t mind to keep the apps free of cost supported by ads which are based on their personal data collected from these apps.
I live in China and I have seen after the pandemic the level of surveillance has increased to a point unforeseen previously. All mobile phones location is monitored and if you were in an area where an infected person had visited, you will get a yellow code in the app. One can’t enter in most buildings and public places without this green QR code. Essentially, every move you make is tracked now at a state and provincial level. When I ask local friends if they find any problem with this they all have the same strawman argument as above. That they haven’t done anything wrong and if this keeps them safe so be it. Not to mention the weekly covid tests in many cities on top of all this.
But Roe vs Wade in US is a good example of how any personal data can be weaponised against us by a change in some local laws. There can also be technological innovations that can use all these data sets to give some detrimental information about us which we can’t anticipate. In this particular case where women found it convenient to track their periods and combined with location data can easily be used to identify who had an abortion or who is planning to have one. With data that can identify you to an individual level, you can be targeted with ads to not have one, doxed on internet or even personally harassed by people and law enforcement.
I am not a legal expert or someone who claim to have a deep understanding of morality on things like abortion and reproductive rights. But one lesson that all of us should learn from what is happening in US is that the personal data that these apps are tracking on us has a potential to hurt us as individuals and our societies in long run. We just don’t know what are these repercussions. What can we do? Just educate yourself about the data privacy, see the data some app is collecting on you, those on apple phones have a greater degree of control on what data can be collected and for god’s sake stop sharing intimate details on social media! That’s my rant..