Data company sold visitor location data for 600 abortion clinics to pro-life group, senator says

Technology@lemmy.world – 352 points – 9 months ago

Broker sold Planned Parenthood visitor location data to pro-life group, senator says

Data company sold visitor location data for 600 abortion clinics to pro-life group, senator says::undefined

This could be seen as a life-endangering move, and the data company should be held reliable, not just for this act, but also for any problems their victims have to endure.

They sold the data fully understanding what it could be used for. I imagine the deal brokered was by a MAGA supporter who works with this data company.

People like that belong behind bars. They are a danger to humans.

Now, people needing an abortion also need a burner paid for winth cash. Fantastic.

This is exactly why we need privacy laws.

I’m male, and my voice is pretty unmistakeable so I can’t very well man the hotlines for agencies helping women find ways to get out of shitty states and have abortions.

I’d happily run all over the tri-state acquiring burners by the bunch though, for this exact use case.

Sounds like a plan. I'll remember this. Thanks.

And a fake name, and fake everything else as well.

Totally. It's grim.

Holy crap that's dark. Now I have even less sympathy for the companies losing revenue from chrome removing third party cookies

You don't need cookies for this kind of targeting....

How do they get the ads to appear on the social media pages of these very specific people? Logistically I’m not sure how that works.

You think the forced birthers are buying this data to show ads? Oh sweet child...

I mean…it is mentioned several times in the article. Do I think that’s all they’re doing? No. But I am curious how they do this one specific thing that the article mentions repeatedly.

A pro-life political organization obtained mobile phone location data from a broker and used it to target people who had visited 600 abortion clinics across the country with advertisements, Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR) announced Tuesday.

The senator began investigating the company last year, in the wake of a Wall Street Journal report revealing that the pro-life Veritas Society had used cell phone location data Near shared with online advertisers to target people visiting Wisconsin Planned Parenthood clinics with misinformation about reproductive health.

On a webpage that has since been removed, Veritas Society revealed that in Wisconsin alone in 2020 it sent 14.3 million ads to people who visited abortion clinics across the state, Wyden said. The page said the organization “served ads to those devices across the women’s social pages, Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat,” he said.

Why are you using a bot account?

lol thanks for pointing that out, I don’t recall ever turning it on. Hopefully it’s fixed now?

1 more...

Veritas

There's a fucking surprise. Pond scum.

thanks for reminding me why I use an ad blocker (and why I hate pro-life fuckers)

Your ad blocker doesn't block location data if your mobile carrier is selling it to these brokers (and they almost certainly are).

It's why there's been such an effort to move to apps instead of webpages that can do the same thing. More data collection and notifications.

That’s been the trend for more than a decade though. Some companies are more militant about it than others.

Kind of like the other site.

Yeah, didn't want to name it, lol.

I'm not even surprised any more. I take a bold guess at what absolutely hideous shit I'll read today and I'm still always surprised.

This shit happened in 2022 too. Nothing has changed. There needs to be more outcry.

https://www.vice.com/en/article/m7vzjb/location-data-abortion-clinics-safegraph-planned-parenthood

Surely they're just interested in advertising products popular with newly aborting mothers. /S

Senator says::undefined

OMG! He's a broken javascript. AI has gone too far!

Seems lawsuits are how we motivate policy. Gotta sue companies into the ground, for policy or law change.

Not only that, but hackers stole every single last bit of patient data from hospitals all over Ontario in Canada as well. I daresay, if you've had an abortion, you exist on some right wing assholes list somewhere.