Why Silicon Valley giants face lawmaker, advocate scrutiny after Roe overturned

Apple CEO Tim Cook, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna and Google CEO Sundar Pichai listen as U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a meeting about cybersecurity in the East Room of the White House on August 25, 2021 in Washington, DC.
Apple CEO Tim Cook, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna and Google CEO Sundar Pichai listen as U.S. President Joe Biden speaks during a meeting about cybersecurity in the East Room of the White House on August 25, 2021 in Washington, DC. Photo credit Drew Angerer/Getty Images

SAN FRANCISCO (KCBS RADIO) – Democrats in Congress and privacy advocates are calling on Silicon Valley tech giants to strengthen user data protections in light of the Supreme Court's decision on Friday to overturn Roe v. Wade.

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Sens. Cory Booker (New Jersey), Elizabeth Warren (Massachusetts), Ron Wyden (Oregon) and Southern California Rep. Sara Jacobs asked Federal Trade Commission Chair Lina Khan asking the regulatory body to investigate Cupertino-based Apple and Mountain View-based Google for allegedly deceiving mobile phone users by selling their data to third parties.

The lawmakers wrote that "individuals seeking abortions … will become particularly vulnerable to privacy harms, including through the collection and sharing of their location data" as a number of states begin enforcing bans on abortion. Nearly half of the states had laws on the books that could be used to ban abortion following the Supreme Court's ruling on Friday, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion rights research organization.

"Just a tremendous amount of data about our intimate lives is being collected, it’s being shared and it's being sold to law enforcement right now," University of Virginia law professor Danielle Citron, who is working with Warren and Jacobs' offices, told KCBS Radio's Jeff Bell and Patti Reising during an interview on Friday night.

"And so my deepest fear, I think will soon be realized, that law enforcement will use that data to provide circumstantial evidence that someone’s gotten an abortion," Citron added. "Even an out-of-state abortion can be used potentially to prosecute someone in a state where abortion is illegal."

Neither Apple nor Google responded to KCBS Radio's requests for comment prior to publication on Friday night.

The ACLU of California echoed Citron’s concerns in an emailed statement to KCBS Radio on Friday afternoon. Technology and Civil Liberties Director Nicole Ozer said that "technology companies are putting millions of people's health and safety at serious risk" after building "massive surveillance systems that prioritize corporate profits at the expense" of users’ privacy, health and safety.

"In a post-Roe world, our digital privacy matters more than ever," Ozer wrote. "Companies like Facebook and Google must stop being in the business of collect it all, use it all – people, not corporations, must be in control of how our personal information is collected, shared, and used."

Facebook's press office didn't respond to KCBS Radio's request for comment prior to publication on Friday night.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital privacy rights organization, said in a release on Friday that technology companies must "protect users by allowing anonymous access, stopping behavioral tracking, strengthening data deletion policies, encrypting data in transit, enabling end-to-end message encryption by default, preventing location tracking" and providing notice to users when their data is sought.

The Supreme Court has previously held that Americans have no reasonable expectation of privacy for information they voluntarily provide to third parties, but Citron contended that the average user is "absolutely not" assuming their data could be shared with law enforcement, whether via subpoena or a "perfectly legal" sale of it by third-party data brokers.

"We think because an app has a privacy policy that they’re guaranteeing privacy for us," Citron – author of the forthcoming book "The Fight for Privacy: Protecting Dignity, Identity, and Love in the Digital Age" – said. "But they're not. Usually if you read those policies, they're saying, 'Look, we're sharing it with third parties.' And those third parties are data brokers that are then selling that information to law enforcement."

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Featured Image Photo Credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images