But just because Big Tech companies collect the most information on Americans, that doesn’t mean Facebook or Google will inevitably be the primary force driving abortion-related arrests. As abortion access becomes further restricted nationwide—and new legal gray areas emerge as other states pass laws attempting to protect access—the courts will have to decide which laws stand up against the others and which evidence is compelling. There will likely be other kinds of tech not yet widely known that could prove more useful to police in conducting abortion surveillance and winning guilty verdicts. A staff technologist and privacy advocate for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) tracking abortion-related privacy concerns, Daly Barnett, told Ars that even before Roe v. Wade was overturned, it was already “a constant battle” for privacy experts struggling to keep up with “what new surveillance technologies law enforcement is abusing.”
The EFF recently revealed one example of a new surveillance technology granting cops access to data that nobody knew they had. A joint investigation from the EFF and the Associated Press brought to light police software called Fog Reveal, which EFF described as a potentially illegal tool that police were trying to keep secret.
Read more at Ars Technica