Post-Roe Online Surveillance of Women Highlights Need to Break Power of Big Tech
Reporter Karina Montoya writes about the role of antitrust in bringing meaningful privacy protections for women’s health data.
The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade combines two seemingly distant movements: women’s rights and data privacy advocates. The connection is easy to see. Big Tech business models that depend on the collection of massive amounts of data can expose women to criminal prosecution for their reproductive health choices.
The problem, however, is that privacy rules alone may not bring women the protections they seek. As long as Google, Facebook, and a few other giants continue to harvest sensitive personal data to drive their advertising-based business models, no American woman will be fully safe. The post-Roe world illuminates the need for antitrust tools to be part of any real solution.
The lack of privacy online has never been an “abstract” danger, as Axios described it recently. Already online tracking and profiling of those who visit Planned Parenthood’s website or use menstrual tracking apps are extension of the types of surveillance that have harmed other vulnerable populations. This includes real estate and rental agencies racially discriminating among readers based on interactions with their Facebook advertisements, or when data brokers sell personal information that enables criminals to harass, stalk or run scams.
At the center of the privacy issue is an ad tech business that has been designed to exploit the radical changes to antitrust policy imposed under the Reagan and Clinton administrations. As Jennifer Brody, U.S. policy and advocacy manager at Access Now, told Open Markets, “At the end of the day, people can’t vote with their feet on choosing platforms that are more rights-respecting because they don’t have a choice.” In a recent column, Brody described the business model of harvesting personal information to serve advertisers is arguably a human rights violation in itself.
Meanwhile, antitrust scholar Dina Srinivasan has explained how this problem has worsened over time. Using Facebook as an example, Srinivasan said the cost of social networking services “is an order of magnitude above what it was when Facebook faced real competition,” in terms of “the amount of data that users now must provide.”
In the post-Roe era, a number of lawmakers have put forward new legislation to protect women’s personal data, with initiatives such as My Body, My Data Act or the Health and Location Data Protection Act. But it’s also imperative that advocates for women’s rights and other groups take full account of the root of the problem: the radical relaxation of antitrust enforcement a generation ago, which allowed for Google and Facebook to become so massive and far reaching.
Since the Roe decision, Google has announced, plans to delete location data of women seeking abortions, though the corporation did not offer any plan to address the personal data that it collects from other websites and applications that connect to its ads network and that continue to profile users seeking these services.
The situation is not entirely bleak. The Biden administration’s initiatives to end the Borkian antitrust philosophy that has opened the door to extreme concentration of power and control is a huge step forward. Congress’ Big Tech antitrust bills and a potential Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit against Google that might call for the corporation to sell parts of its ad tech business would also strike at Google’s core business model.
This article originally appeared in The Corner newsletter of July 14, 2022.