Tracking Gay Priests and Abortion Seekers with Location Data

A few weeks ago, the Washington Post reported that a group of Catholics in Colorado has spent millions of dollars digitally surveilling gay priests who use hookup apps. The group purchased publicly available data that is usually provided for marketers on ad exchanges. Then, they cross-referenced location data with the locations of seminaries and church residences. This let them find phones that used apps like Grindr that were based in Catholic residences and, then, out the priests who used them.

This type of location tracking is common, as is the ability to obtain lists of people who have walked into a specific geographic area. Many apps track users' location and movements. They can do this with standard GPS location tracking, but also through what WiFi networks you connect to or where you check in on social media. This data is aggregated and used, most commonly, for geo-fenced advertising. Geofencing allows a marketer to draw a boundary on a map and target ads to people whose phones have entered that boundary. For example, a cupcake shop may draw a geofence around their store and then serve cupcake ads to anyone within it who has previously visited them.

And just because you're probably not a gay Catholic priest, that doesn't mean you shouldn't be worried. This kind of data could be used to track women seeking abortion care, mental health services, or engaging in lawful protests. Many variations on these uses are already happening.

In the advertising domain, we have seen this kind of sensitive location used in the past. The Cut reported on a Boston advertiser that used this same technology to track when people go to abortion clinics and then it used that data to target them with anti-abortion ads. Anyone could buy a list of people who had visited these clinics, too. Vice reported that for a mere $160, they could buy a list of people who visited Planned Parenthood, along with where they were before and where they went after. One could easily imagine data like this being used for lawsuits in states with bounties on people who receive, or help others receive, abortions. And indeed, law enforcement also buys this type of data, which allows them to track citizens without a warrant.

These types of targeting illustrate the damage that can be done to people's lives when their private movements are up for sale. Ads may be annoying, but these examples show how access to such sensitive data can be used to ruin the lives of people participating in perfectly legal activities. It emphasizes the need for better legal protections over this data, which are still, unfortunately, far away.