If Roe v. Wade is overturned, can criminal prosecutors or tech companies use smartphone data against someone?
Now that the future of U.S. abortion laws hangs in the balance, many women are questioning the degree of caution needed to keep their cyber activity confidential – especially period and fertility tracking apps, smartphone location data, and social media interactions.
Cybersecurity and legal experts say the answer largely boils down to one major issue: the right to privacy.
"There's this notion of the expectation of privacy," says Brad Malin, PhD, a professor of biomedical informatics, biostatistics, and computer science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville.
Malin says it's directly related to bodily privacy that a person expects they have control of as part of their own environment.
According to Malin, this is "why this whole notion of Roe v. Wade at the present moment is really relevant. The right to privacy is mentioned about a dozen times within the law for the case."
"This is why we don't know what's going to happen with Roe v. Wade, but it worries a lot of privacy professionals," he says. "It leads down this slippery slope of if you don't even have control over your own body, then with electronic communications … we might as well not even start."
