The organization let the marketing trackers run on its programming pages
June 29, 2022 at 11:29 a.m. EDT Abortion rights activists cheer outside a Planned Parenthood clinic during a June 24 demonstration in West California (Jae C. Hong / AP) Placeholder as the article’s actions load The The decision of the Supreme Court last week The reversal of the right to abortion nationwide in the United States may have led concerned people to flood the Planned Parenthood website to learn about nearby clinics or schedule services. But if they used the agency’s online programming tool, it looks like Planned Parenthood could share the location of people – and, in some cases, even the abortion method they chose – with major tech companies. An investigation by Lockdown Privacy, the maker of an application that blocks online monitoring, has found that Planned Parenthood web developer can share information with various third parties, including Google, Facebook, TikTok and Hotjar, a tracking tool that says it helps companies understand how customers are behaving. These outside companies receive data, such as IP addresses, approximate zip codes and service options, which privacy experts worry could be valuable to state governments seeking to prosecute abortions. In a video posted to the Washington Post, Lockdown founder Johnny Lin visited the Planned Parenthood website, opened the programming tool, entered a zip code, and opted for “surgical abortion” as a service. As it clicked, a development tool let it see how data such as its IP address was being shared with Google, Facebook and many other third-party companies. Only companies will know for sure how they use our data, but any data on servers is vulnerable to potential cyber attacks or government calls. In a criminal abortion case, an IP address would be appropriate, because with the help of ISPs, law enforcement can track IP addresses of individuals. “It was absolutely shocking,” Lin said. “We have analyzed and reviewed the monitoring behaviors of hundreds of applications and websites and it is rare to see this degree of carelessness with sensitive health data.” Planned Parenthood spokeswoman Lauren Kokum said the organization uses trackers for marketing efforts. He did not answer questions about whether the organization intends to remove detailed marketing data from its programming page, given the new state-level abortion bans, or why trackers were originally operating on the programming page. “Marketing is an essential part of Planned Parenthood’s work to reach out to people seeking care, education and sexual and reproductive health information,” he said. The decision of the Supreme Court on Friday Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization sparked new concern about the multitude of digital data that companies collect every time we open an app, surf the internet or take our phones on a trip. In states where abortion is criminalized, will law enforcement turn to digital data from text messages, period applications and other sources as evidence of crime, people wondered? Others have wondered what big data collectors, such as Facebook and Google, would do if their state governments issued summonses demanding that they hand over their data. Facebook, Google and TikTok declined to comment on how they would respond to government requests for abortion data. Hotjar did not respond to a request for comment.
IP address Visited the site Website behavior Reason for visiting the site (eg “abortion”) User-selected abortion method (eg surgical abortion / in the clinic) Browser time zone Name of Scheduled Parent Health Center for appointments The user’s current zip code estimate based on the IP address The user’s closest partner based on the Postcode Time stamp Whether the user came from a search engine, a link, or entered the URL directly Customer ID (According to Google’s documentation, “This identifies a specific instance of a user, device, or browser. For the Web, this is generally stored as a first-party cookie that is two years old.”) Browser language
Share data with Facebook
IP address Visited the site Website behavior Time stamp Unique Facebook browser ID
IP address Visited the site Website behavior Phone type Operating system and version Browser and version Time stamp
“Advertisers should not send sensitive information to individuals through our business tools,” said Andy Stone, a spokesman for Meta, the company that owns Facebook. “This is against our policies and we are training advertisers to properly set up business tools to avoid this. When businesses do this, the filtering mechanism is designed to prevent potentially sensitive data from entering our ad system. Based on our criticism, that’s what happened here. “ Russell Ketchum, director of Google Analytics, said organizations that use Google Analytics can delete their data at any time, adding that the latest version of the analytics tool, Google Analytics 4, automatically rejects IP addresses . As an organization that has long provided sensitive health care services, Planned Parenthood should know better than running detailed third-party data on a programming page used by people in states with current or upcoming abortion bans, Cooper Quintin said. senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “It’s really irresponsible for Planned Parenthood to create more data for site visitors and more evidence for people looking for their services,” he said. “Planned Parenthood must – right now, right now – minimize the amount of data it shares with any outside party and minimize the amount of data it retains.” Are you looking for an abortion? See how you can avoid leaving a digital mark.
