Are You Buying Pregnancy Data?

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The market for data is hundreds of billion dollars deep, and everybody wants a slice of that pie. It's not just the last time you menstrated, it's did you buy a pregnancy test? Did you walk by an abortion clinic? Are you visiting a lot of like, pre c forums lately? Are you buying maternity ware? Its retail data, its location data, its psychographic its data from insurance companies,. Because brokers start collecting data on you from the time you're born until until you die. So i feel like saying anything else is being disingenuous. And at the end of the day, this is like a critique that i forget that i don't think itis unw

Paris Marx is joined by Shoshana Wodinsky to discuss how the digital infrastructure that companies have built out over the past couple decades to track everything we do in order to serve us ads places us at risk, and how that’s come into focus since the overturning of abortion rights in Roe v Wade in the United States.

Shoshana Wodinsky is a privacy reporter at Gizmodo. Follow Shoshana on Twitter at @swodinsky.

Tech Won’t Save Us offers a critical perspective on tech, its worldview, and wider society with the goal of inspiring people to demand better tech and a better world. Follow the podcast (@techwontsaveus) and host Paris Marx (@parismarx) on Twitter, and support the show on Patreon.

Find out more about Harbinger Media Network at harbingermedianetwork.com.

Also mentioned in this episode:

Shoshana wrote about getting an abortion in the age of surveillance and why every company is becoming an ad network. With her colleagues at Gizmodo, she also wrote about how Facebook perpetuated climate denial and killed news feed changes that would anger conservatives.
Anti-abortion groups targeted ads at people who had visited abortion clinics.
Data brokers have been selling data on people who visit abortion clinics, including Planned Parenthood.

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