Boston Globe | Legislature needs to ban the sale of cellphone location data

Lawmakers need to stop this practice before location data is used to harm people seeking or providing reproductive health care in the state

By Rebecca Hart Holder, Carol Rose, Nate Horwitz

Op-ed originally appeared in The Boston Globe

One year ago this week, Massachusetts made history by signing into law one of the best protections in the nation for abortion patients and providers. The law — passed just a month after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade — met the urgency of the moment by making abortion care more affordable and accessible and by offering legal protections to those seeking or providing lawful care in our state.

Since the Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 20 states have passed laws to ban or severely restrict abortion, leaving more than 25 million people of reproductive age without access to critical health care.

When the Dobbs decision was first leaked in May 2022, Massachusetts lawmakers listened to the calls of patients, providers, LGBTQ advocates, and attorneys to proactively draft policy that would expand access to critical care. In response, the Legislature enacted a “shield law,” which included several recommendations from our organizations’ Beyond Roe Agenda to help protect both abortion and gender-affirming care in our state and broadly improve reproductive health access.

Among other provisions, the law takes steps to protect health care providers’ professional licenses and to keep medical malpractice insurance within reach for these providers in Massachusetts. It also assures providers and patients that Massachusetts courts and officers will not facilitate a state’s hostile investigation of the provision of reproductive health care and gender-affirming care that is lawful in Massachusetts.

The shield law has received national recognition, including from Vice President Kamala Harris. At an event recognizing our state legislative leaders, she remarked, “The work that is happening here in Massachusetts is a model … that can and, we believe, should happen around the country.” Indeed, several states have since followed Massachusetts’s lead.

The law gives people — not politicians in other states — the ability to decide whether and when to have children, and seeks to welcome those who are able to travel or even relocate their lives due to restrictive laws in their home state. It gives providers protections so that they can continue providing the most effective, evidence-based, compassionate health care. And it makes the state a beacon for reproductive equity in a post-Roe world.

But here’s the catch: We’re not done.

Attacks on abortion access were never going to stop with Dobbs — they are getting more sophisticated and more technologically savvy. In order to better protect patients and providers in Massachusetts, the state needs to ensure that bounty hunters and other extremists can’t purchase cellphone location data to target people seeking or providing lawful care in our state.

Every day, companies collect and sell personal location data from our cellphones, revealing where we live, work, seek medical care, and more. Without any federal or state laws to stop them, third-party data brokers are allowed to sell this location data to anyone with a credit card. In a post-Dobbs America, the widespread availability of detailed and personally identifiable location data allows out-of-state law enforcement agencies and anti-abortion bounty hunters to conduct broad fishing expeditions, looking for targets for harassment and worse.

And the data are right there waiting for them: After the leaked Dobbs decision, a reporter found that data brokers were selling location information of people who visited abortion clinics. In its investigation of one data broker, the Federal Trade Commission examined records collected from more than 61 million mobile devices and found “the data could be used to identify people who have visited a reproductive health clinic,” allowing a buyer “to track a mobile device from a reproductive health clinic to a single-family residence to other places routinely visited.”

For us to truly recognize the power of our shield law in protecting abortion access in our state, we need to protect our digital footprints, too. Massachusetts has another opportunity to lead by passing the nation’s first Location Shield Act. This popular legislation — backed by 92 percent of Massachusetts likely voters — would ban the sale of cellphone location data, stopping this practice before it’s used to harm people seeking or providing reproductive health care in the state.

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe, Massachusetts was ready. The threats to abortion access will keep coming, but with bold new measures like the Location Shield Act, we can, and should, be ready for whatever comes next.