The fact that our phones are personal tracking devices can be handy. Like when using a ride share app, your driver knows exactly where to meet you.
But this can be terrifying if you have to hide routine medical care like an abortion. Your specific location, provided by the cellphone in your pocket, is available to anyone who can pay for it. And because there is no regulation over the collection, use and sale of this data, it is too easy for it to fall into the wrong hands.
It is unconscionable to think that privacy, therefore safety, is at risk because of a cellphone. In Massachusetts, we have the chance to change that. Massachusetts bill H.357/S.148 is a first-in-the-nation bill to prohibit the sale or leasing of location data and would require companies to obtain consent to collect or process that data.
By passing this bill, Massachusetts can lead the country in common-sense digital location protections for everyone living in or coming to our state. We should be concerned for our own privacy, and we should be equally concerned for others’ especially those traveling to our state to receive an abortion because essential health care has been criminalized in their home state.
This is not hypothetical hand-wringing. This October, Idaho used cellphone data to arrest a teen and his mother for helping his girlfriend leave the state to get an abortion. We can’t let that happen here.
I am proud to live in a state that doubled down on protecting reproductive freedom and bodily autonomy, for everyone, not just Bay Staters. But if location data can be used to persecute or prosecute someone for accessing legally protected health care, those protections mean little. With your help, Massachusetts can be proactive, not reactive, in protecting all our privacy. Ask your representatives today to support H.357/S.148 to keep your own, and everyone else’s, location private.
Kate Glynn
Northampton