Rindala Alajaji of EFF writes:
Your location data isn’t just a pin on a map—it’s a powerful tool that reveals far more than most people realize. It can expose where you work, where you pray, who you spend time with, and, sometimes dangerously, where you seek healthcare. In today’s world, your most private movements are harvested, aggregated, and sold to anyone with a credit card. For those seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care, or visiting a protest or a immigration law clinic, this data is a ticking time bomb.
Last year, we sounded the alarm, urging lawmakers to protect individuals from the growing threats of location tracking tools—tools that are increasingly being used to target and criminalize people seeking essential reproductive healthcare.
The good news? Lawmakers in California, Massachusetts, Illinois and elsewhere are stepping up, leading the way to protect privacy and ensure that healthcare access and other exercise of our rights remain safe from invasive surveillance.
The Dangers of Location Data
Imagine this: you leave your home in Alabama, drop your kids off at daycare, and then drive across state lines to visit an abortion clinic in Florida. You spend two hours there before driving back home. Along the way, you used your phone’s GPS app to navigate or a free radio app to listen to the news. Unbeknownst to you, this “free” app tracked your entire route and sold it to a data broker. That broker then mapped your journey and made it available to anyone who would pay for it. This is exactly what happened when privacy advocates used a tool called Locate X, developed by Babel Street, to track a person’s device as they traveled from Alabama—where abortion is completely banned—to Florida, where abortion access is severely restricted but still available.
Despite this tool being marketed as solely for law enforcement use, private investigators were able to access it by falsely claiming they would work with law enforcement, revealing a major flaw in our data privacy system. In a time when government surveillance of private personal decisions is on the rise, the fact that law enforcement (and adversaries pretending to be law enforcement) can access these tools puts our personal privacy in serious danger.
Read more at EFF.