Why You Might Want to Leave Your Phone at Home When Seeking Reproductive Care
Our phones are constantly tracking us. It’s a sad reality of the world we live in, and an investigation published by 404 Media shows just how intrusive and detailed location tracking can be. They were able to show that a service offered to government contractors could trace the path of an individual phone from a person’s home to an abortion clinic and back home.
This particular tool, Locate X, is run by a company called Babel Street, which sells access to law enforcement agencies and government contractors. (The investigator received access to a free trial of the software and shared his findings with journalists from several media companies, including 404.)
How governments can track your location through your smartphone
Locate X uses data your phone sends to advertisers and app developers. Every smartphone has a MAID, or Mobile Advertising Identifier, which uniquely identifies your phone but is not associated with who you are—at least in theory.
Advertisers can creatively use these identifiers for a variety of purposes. They can use them to send you ads based on your location, and different platforms can combine their information to see if they can show you ads in one app based on terms you searched for in another.
As our own Steven Johnson explained , many of the things that make it seem like your phone is listening to your actual conversations are actually due to much creepier things advertisers do with the data available through more traditional methods. They can show you ads that are relevant to what your friends and family are into, whether they’ve talked to you about it or not.
Your maid is, of course, not entirely anonymous. Advertisers and data brokers know that a certain phone spends a lot of time at a certain address and can be sure that this is your home. It’s easy for them to find out where you work, where you often shop, and so on. If you’re driving to a friend’s house and then cross state lines into an abortion clinic, you probably don’t want your home state government to know, especially if it’s a state that recently banned abortions and may even criminalize the behavior of helping someone get an out-of-state abortion.
But if local governments or law enforcement sign up for a service that provides this information, they can use it to find out who you are and what you’ve done. As 404 points out, such data is already used by agencies such as ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), CBP (Customs and Border Protection) and others.
What can you do to make it harder for governments to track you?
Obviously, the safest option is to leave your phone at home when you seek reproductive help, or go somewhere else where you don’t want to be tracked. But that might not be an option considering how many things we do with our phones these days.
You can turn off location permissions for certain apps; Here are the instructions for Android andfor iPhone .
You can prevent apps from sharing your activity with advertisers or data brokers. Here are the instructions for Android andfor iPhone .
You can turn off your phone. It may not stop all types of location tracking, but the type of data Locate X collects depends on specific apps and ad networks, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation explains in its guide to understanding different location tracking technologies.