WASHINGTON — More than a dozen Senate Democrats led by Elizabeth Warren are demanding data brokers provide information about mobile phone location data collection that can be tied to abortion clinics.
The Democrats wrote to SafeGraph Inc. and Placer.ai, which sell geographic and foot traffic data based on cellphone location, to highlight the risk to privacy and safety from allowing customers to track mobile phones to an abortion provider’s location.
“Especially in the wake of the Supreme Court’s leaked draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade, your company’s sale of such data — to virtually anyone with a credit card — poses serious dangers for all women seeking access to abortion services,” the senators wrote.
Lawmakers also noted that in the past, such data has allowed advertisers to target women while they are at clinics, including with anti-abortion ads.
Placer said earlier this month that it had taken Planned Parenthood data off its dashboard and was working to remove “all sensitive places” from its system.
SafeGraph also recently issued a statement on the issue, vowing to limit access to some data about family planning centers.
“To our knowledge, nobody has ever used SafeGraph Patterns data for malicious purposes,” the company said in the statement.
The letters, first reported by NBC News, come in the wake of the leaked draft Supreme Court opinion that would overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade ruling that legalized abortion nationwide.
Such a move would result in a patchwork of state laws governing access to the procedure. Twenty-six states are certain or likely to ban the procedure, including 13 with so-called trigger bans that are tied to Roe being overturned, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a reproductive health research organization that supports abortion rights.
Abortion is gaining ground as a key issue in this year’s midterm elections, and Senate Democrats have been moving to highlight it. Last week, Senate Democrats were blocked in their attempt to enshrine abortion rights in federal law in a 49-51 vote that highlighted both the deep divide on the politically explosive issue.
