Democratic lawmakers are piling pressure on data brokers to stop collecting information on pregnant people in order to protect those seeking abortions. They’re not having much luck.
For years, brokers have sold datasets on millions of expectant parents from their trimester status to their preferred birth methods. Now that the Supreme Court has overturned Roe v. Wade, that same data is becoming a political issue, with abortion-rights groups warning that states with abortion bans are likely to weaponize it.
In the three months since POLITICO reported the draft opinion against Roe, numerous congressional Democrats have sent letters to data brokers urging them to stop the practice, promised to interrogate the companies about their collections and introduced bills to restrict reproductive health data from being collected and sold.
But in the absence of federal data privacy legislation or any likely chance of it getting the support needed to pass, many brokers aren’t taking heed.
POLITICO found more than 30 listings from data brokers offering information on expecting parents or selling access to those people through mass email blasts. Twenty-five of them were updated after the Supreme Court’s ruling on Roe v. Wade on June 24.
Exact Data, a data broker that offers names, emails and mailing addresses of more than 23,000 expecting parents, updated its inventory as recently as August 1. PK List Marketing also updated its “She’s Having a Baby – PRENATAL Mailing List” on August 1, according to its listing on NextMark, a directory of marketing email lists.
NextMark’s CEO Joe Pych said he saw no issue with hosting these lists.
“As far as I know, there’s no law today that prohibits prenatal mailing lists. If that were to change and this type of data became illegal, we’d work with the providers to remove these listings,” Pych said. NextMark itself doesn’t collect or sell any data. Neither PK List Marketing nor Exact Data responded to requests for comment.
Abortion rights groups and lawmakers on their side argue that this information has become dangerous, putting pregnant people at risk of prosecution both if they seek abortions or even if they just seek reproductive care that could be construed as doing so.
“It is shockingly irresponsible for a data broker to bury their head in the sand and pretend their business of tracking pregnancies and selling that information for profit won’t be weaponized by far-right extremists,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), who introduced the My Body, My Data Act of 2022 to limit reproductive health data collection, said in an email.
The risk isn’t hypothetical. Police have used digital evidence such as text messages and search histories in the past to enforce abortion laws. In 2015, Indiana prosecutors used a woman’s online search history as evidence to prove she illegally induced her own abortion. She was convicted of feticide.
Data brokers who amass collections on pregnant people say they get this information from sources like online activities, surveys, magazine subscriptions and purchases from businesses like maternity clothing stores. Multiple data brokers’ privacy policies say they would share data with law enforcement in response to a warrant.
The lawmakers have had a handful of successes with their pressure campaign. Data brokers SafeGraph and Placer.ai stopped offering data on abortion clinics around the U.S. after Vice articles revealed their practices and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called out the companies. Tech companies like Google have responded by vowing to delete location data logs from abortion clinics,
But shame is the main tool at their disposal, and a difficult one to wield when the data broker industry is made up of hundreds of small companies that aren’t widely known. That’s especially true of data on pregnant people given that one of the largest players, Experian, stopped offering such datasets in 2016. Experian did not explain why it stopped offering this dataset.
“When companies and their executives are called out by name — in the media, online, and especially by members of Congress — they pay more attention,” said Justin Sherman, who runs a data brokerage research project at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy. “Simultaneously, data brokers are under no illusions about Congress’ likelihood of passing privacy regulations anytime soon.”
Lawmakers have tried and failed to pass data privacy regulations for years. Congress has made progress in recent months on a bipartisan bill, The American Data Privacy and Protection Act, which passed out of committee on July 21. But it doesn’t have backing from Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), who heads the Senate Commerce committee, making it unlikely to pass.
Cantwell has argued that the bill lacks strong enforcement measures, and is backing her own legislation, the Consumer Online Privacy Rights Act.
And the two bills introduced specifically to block collection of health-related data are only backed by a handful of Democrats and aren’t expected to gain wider support.
In July, Rep. Lori Trahan (D-Mass.) said she intended to identify and send letters to any entity that collected, used, sold or disclosed data that could be used against pregnant people.
“At a bare minimum, these companies should stop collecting or deriving sensitive data like reproductive health data,” Trahan said in an email. Her message to the companies: “Stop putting your bottom line above everything else.”
Exact Data sells a dataset with contact information such as name, emails and mailing addresses for up to 23,217 expecting parents for about $2,786. MedicoReach sells similar raw data on pregnant women, along with location, age and income. MedicoReach also did not respond to a request for comment.
Such datasets offer significant insights on thousands of expectant parents, including purchase history, the states they live in, and when they are expected to give birth. While all of that information is useful for a marketer, it could be used to identify people who terminate their pregnancies in states with abortion bans — or who engaged in allegedly risky behavior that authorities may blame for the death of the fetus.
Complete Medical Lists, for example, offers a mailing list with more than 585,000 mailing addresses for expecting parents and 185,593 email addresses. Data from people in 10 states where abortions are banned make up nearly half of the dataset.
Tim Burnell, the owner of Complete Medical Lists, dismissed the idea that this could be dangerous.
“I simply cannot imagine a scenario where a law enforcement agency could obtain a subpoena for, essentially, every self-reported new pregnancy in the U.S.,” Burnell said.
Reach Marketing also offers a mailing list, boasting a collection of 818,000 expectant moms, packaged with data showing when they are expected to give birth, as well as information like their purchase history.
Both of them don’t sell the data they collect and only offer tailored email blasts, but their collections could be available to law enforcement agencies. Reach Marketing’s privacy policy noted that the company could give data to law enforcement agencies if requested. Complete Medical Lists’ “,”link”:{“target”:”NEW”,”attributes”:[],”url”:”http://completemedicallists.com/privacy.php”,”_id”:”00000182-5b2c-d984-a5ae-7f6fd458000c”,”_type”:”33ac701a-72c1-316a-a3a5-13918cf384df”},”_id”:”00000182-5b2c-d984-a5ae-7f6fd458000d”,”_type”:”02ec1f82-5e56-3b8c-af6e-6fc7c8772266″}”>privacy policy also says it would share data in response to a warrant.
The level of detail in these lists could be combined in dangerous ways, the lawmakers argue. A prosecutor in a state where abortion is illegal could subpoena data on pregnant people in the state, and combine that with location data from a different data broker to show that a person traveled across state lines to an abortion clinic, for example.
“Americans cannot trust data brokers to keep their most personal information private — and that puts women at risk,” said Warren, who introduced one of the bills to ban data brokers from selling health data, the Health and Location Data Protection Act.
Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-Calif.), who introduced a bill in January that would ban targeted advertising, has been calling on companies to stop collecting data on women’s health entirely.
“Data brokers and all companies that collect personal data have an obligation to ensure intimate data about women’s health isn’t collected in the first place, allowing prosecutors in states that criminalize abortion to use it against women,” Eshoo said in an email.
Data brokers who have stopped haven’t given clear reasons on why. Placer.ai said it wasn’t in the company’s “business interests” to provide information about Planned Parenthood clinics, while SafeGraph didn’t give a reason it stopped selling those location insights.
In general, data brokers argue their tools are beneficial resources for pregnant people. NextMark’s Pych noted the company’s mailing lists help new parents get discounts on necessities like diapers and baby formula.
And some of the purveyors of email lists say they wouldn’t allow those lists to be used for campaigns for or against abortion rights.
Josephine Messina, a vice president of direct marketing services with Reach Marketing, said the company has to approve all email blasts, and would not allow ads for either abortion pills or for crisis pregnancy centers, clinics that abortion rights opponents have set up to counsel pregnant people against abortions.
Burnell said Complete Medical Lists requires similar approvals for email blasts and also wouldn’t approve such advocacy ads. He said the company has no plans to stop any of its data collection on pregnant people, but that could change if they’re being used to target people for seeking abortions.
“Should some entity attempt to weaponize a marketing list, we would certainly reconsider,” he said.
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