Healthcare will always be at least a little political. If some politicians have their way, it’ll be corporations with vertical integration controlling every aspect of your health from the retail stores, prescription providers, loans to doctors, and payments to doctors from insurance. Complete deregulation and profit-driven decisions about your health that put patient outcomes and health behind profits. Then there’s the other end of the spectrum. Healthcare that is accessible to everyone, controlled by doctors and the representatives people elect, and not for profit.
Unfortunately, we’re kind of stuck with the one option.
However, there are other growing concerns in healthcare. People who can get pregnant, largely women between puberty and menopause, and transgender people of all ages, are having their necessary and life-saving healthcare options not only restricted, but policed. Women and healthcare providers can face years in prison for performing an abortion, even if the woman’s life is at risk. Meanwhile trans people face losing the healthcare they rely on to survive. This has already lead to preventable deaths.
A police state relies on surveillance, and for-profit corporations have an answer for them once again. The very same technology that serves up hyper-focused advertising can also track when you’ve gone to the doctor.
Leak Shows how Fog Data Helps Cops Find Your Locations
The leak involved with the current Fog Data Science revelations is a light one, but more information about this company has come out in previous investigations. 404Media received what is allegedly a single intake form possibly meant for police departments. The first thing you may notice is that the top of the form makes no mention or requirement for a warrant, or even a guarantee that it is only for law enforcement agencies. If this is indeed a legitimate form, as 404Media claims, Fog may still do their own, separate verification of these important requirements. Their website seems to have little information on this, but does have a focus on law enforcement. In a separate report from 2022, the EFF called Fog Data Science’s access to data “often warrantless.”
“This means that police, sometimes without a warrant, have the ability to track the precise movements of hundreds of millions of Americans as they go about their day. This is mass surveillance, often with no judicial oversight.”
– Matthew Guariglia, writing for the EFF
The alleged Fog Data form is otherwise straightforward. It asks whoever is filling it out to give information on a person of interest. This includes anything that could identify them, like biographical information, including name, aliases, gender, race, and religion. Also collected are known points of interest. This is where the form starts to show how dangerous it could be. The locations include family’s homes, friends, any known associate points of interest, as well as “Doctor, Lawyer, [or] Other Offices.”
In a world where basic, life-saving healthcare could be against the law, one of those categories strikes fear in marginalized groups that include half the population as well as all transgender people.
Geofencing Dangers
Early last year, another frightening revelation hit privacy and healthcare advocates. Meta, Google, and other large collectors of data could also potentially help police hunt down people seeking abortions or gender-affirming care for transgender people. A technique called “geofencing” can make any collection of location data dangerous.
Geofencing is a term for defining a boxed-in area on a map, and performing actions based on that area. Sometimes it could be getting an alert for a nearby store that might interest you. In this case, however, it’s defining an area on a map and then collecting the location data of everyone who passed through it. You can even potentially follow location data back to a person’s house and tie an “anonymous” user with their actual identity. This is very useful if you’re trying to track people who went to a specific place, like a murder scene or a doctor’s office.
According to EFF’s investigation in 2022, Fog Reveal, a web app from Fog, allowed law enforcement to create map areas and collect data on everyone who passed through those areas. When the EFF investigated Fog Data, they found the company had “billions” of data points on over 250 million devices. This data can reportedly be made available to “highway patrols and county sheriffs” for “less than $10,000 a year.”
Fog Data has stated that they keep location data for 3 years, and have “near real-time” data. Their data is apparently sourced from adtech services, data that can be purchased usually for advertising purposes, so it’s certainly plausible this could be accurate and recent data, delayed only by the amount of time Fog would need to process the data they ingest.
One of Many Such Privacy Violations
Fog Data is hardly the only company making a profit from location data. Joseph Cox, while writing for Vice, previously reported on Safegraph, which included location data tied to Planned Parenthood visits. They stopped selling that data and eventually shut down altogether after the report. Placer.ai could also track people who visited Planned Parenthood clinics, and even report where they lived. However, they also removed that feature after an investigation.
Still, if these services can take a point of interest in something as simple as a city block, police don’t have to specify Planned Parenthood. They could just make a doctor’s office a point of interest. It’s impossible to ensure location data is not used however a buyer likes.
Legal Proceedings Can’t Protect You
Privacy is important. It may seem sometimes like your techie friend is paranoid about phone numbers being given to services, but that number makes it easy to track a person’s location, buying habits, recent purchases, and more. All of that can quickly become dangerous in an authoritarian nation state seeking to strip people of their most basic human rights, like their heathcare, their life itself. While privacy laws may protect people in some countries, others will find that data and the dollar matter more than their privacy rights. When it comes to enforcing draconian healthcare bans, an authoritarian state isn’t going to stop because violating privacy seems icky.
You will have to be the protector of your own privacy. This means not using location services in apps that don’t need it. It could mean buying a faraday bag for trips to your doctor’s office (as well as protests). It means not giving out any more data to any company than they need to perform the actions you require of them. Moving more of your communication from various messaging services to Signal. Privacy is going to become more scarce, and with laws that could make simply saving your own life with necessary healthcare illegal, you’re going to have to be vigilant. Your past data could betray you, and you may never know how it will one day be misused. The only way to protect yourself from unseen problems in the future may be protecting yourself now.