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Content type: Long Read
IntroductionHarnessing new digital technology to improve people’s health is now commonplace across the world. Countries and international organisations alike are devising digital health strategies and looking to emerging technology to help solve tricky problems within healthcare. At the same time, more and more start-ups and established tech companies are bringing out new, and at times innovative, digital tools aimed at health and wellbeing.
Content type: Long Read
IntroductionData about our health reveals some of the most sensitive, intimate - and potentially embarrassing - information about who we are. Confidentiality is, and has always been, at the very heart of medical ethics. People need to be able to trust their doctors, nurses and other healthcare providers so that they are not afraid to tell them something important about their health for fear of shame, judgement or social exclusion.It’s no surprise then that data protection regimes around…
Content type: Long Read
Introduction
The 28th of September marks International Safe Abortion Day. It remains a day necessary to mobilise and raise awareness of the continued struggles women and girls face when accessing reproductive healthcare, including access to safe abortion. Across the world, abortion continues to be criminalised, restricted and in some places under attack. All of which constitute severe obstacles for women and girls to fully exercise their human rights, particularly their right to privacy, which…
Content type: Long Read
This piece is a part of a collection of research that demonstrates how data-intensive systems that are built to deliver reproductive and maternal healthcare are not adequately prioritising equality and privacy.
Digital health apps of all kinds are being used by people to better understand their bodies, their fertility, and to access health information. But there are concerns that the information people both knowingly and unknowing provide to the app, which can be very personal health…
Content type: Long Read
For over 20 years with the start of the first use of ICTs in the 1990s, we have seen a digital revolution in the health sector. The Covid-19 pandemic significantly accelerated the digitalisation of the health sector, and it illustrates how fast this uptake can be and what opportunities can emerge; but also, importantly, the risks that it involves.
As we've said many times before, whilst technologies can be part of the solution to tackle some socio-economic and political challenges facing our…
Content type: Long Read
In 2019, we exposed the practices of five menstruation apps that were sharing your most intimate data with Facebook and other third parties. We were pleased to see that upon the publication of our research some of them decided to change their practices. But we always knew the road to effective openness, transparency, informed consent and data minimisation would be a long one when it comes to apps, which for the most part make profit from our menstrual cycle and even sometimes one’s desire to…
Content type: Video
Dr. Andrea Swartzendruber is the principal investigator for the Pregnancy Resource Center Evaluation at Emory University's Center for Reproductive Health Research in the Southeast. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the University of Georgia College of Public Health and an adjunct professor at Emory University Rollins School of Public Health. She has recently published and presented research findings on pregnancy resource centers (also known…
Content type: Video
Find out more here: https://privacyinternational.org/long-read/3669/documentation-data-exploitation-sexual-and-reproductive-rights
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Content type: Video
This podcast is part of a special series from PI's Reproductive Rights and Privacy Project.
The series comes out on the last Monday of every month.
You can listen and subscribe to the podcast where ever you normally find your podcasts:
Spotify
Apple podcasts
Google podcasts
Castbox
Overcast
Pocket Casts
Peertube
Youtube
Stitcher
and more...
Content type: Long Read
This research was commissioned as part of Privacy International’s global research into data exploitative technologies used to curtail women’s access to reproductive rights. Reproductive Rights and Privacy Project. Read about Privacy International’s Reproductive Rights and Privacy Project here and our research findings here.
1. What are the barriers to access safe and legal abortion care?
In Kenya, access to abortion care is restricted by the Constitution, which provides that: “…
Content type: Long Read
This research was commissioned as part of Privacy International’s global research into data exploitative technologies used to curtail women’s access to reproductive rights.
Read about Privacy International’s Reproductive Rights and Privacy Project here and our research findings here.
1. What are the barriers to access safe and legal abortion care?
Even though abortion is legal in certain cases in Argentina, different types of barriers restrict the access to legal abortions, contribute…
Content type: Long Read
The organised opposition to sexual and reproductive rights has gone digital. Data exploitative tech is being developed that is capable of obtaining vast amounts of intimate information about people’s reproductive health, and delaying or curtailing access to reproductive healthcare.
Technology provides incredible opportunities to democratise access to reproductive health information, services, and care. It can play a vital role in protecting the lives of those needing sexual and reproductive…
Content type: Video
PI's Reproductive Rights and Privacy Project speaks with Tasneem Mewa and Ambika Tandon from the Center for Internet and Society about data exploitation in reproductive rights in India.
This podcast is part of a special series from PI's Reproductive Rights and Privacy Project.
The series comes out on the last Monday of every month.
You can listen and subscribe to the podcast where ever you normally find your podcasts:
Spotify
Apple podcasts
Google podcasts
Castbox
Overcast
Pocket…
Content type: News & Analysis
This week International Health Day was marked amidst a global pandemic which has impacted every region in the world. And it gives us a chance to reflect on how tech companies, governments, and international agencies are responding to Covid-19 through the use of data and tech.
All of them have been announcing measures to help contain or respond to the spread of the virus; but too many allow for unprecedented levels of data exploitation with unclear benefits, and raising so many red flags…
Content type: Long Read
This piece was written by Aayush Rathi and Ambika Tandon, who are policy officers at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS) in India. The piece was originally published on the website Economic Policy Weekly India here.
In order to bring out certain conceptual and procedural problems with health monitoring in the Indian context, this article posits health monitoring as surveillance and not merely as a “data problem.” Casting a critical feminist lens, the historicity of surveillance practices…
Content type: Examples
Rewire.News has reported that Google apparently remains unwilling to differentiate its Maps search results between clinics in the US that offer abortion care and faith-based organisations that do not provide abortion care.
Rewire.News reports that, in contrast Yelp "made a concerted effort" to ensure that the company differentiated between faith-based centres, also known as crisis pregnancy centres in the US, and medical facilities that provided medical reproductive healthcare, including…
Content type: Examples
Ahead of the Irish referendum to amend the Constitutions of Ireland to allow the parliament to legislative for abortion which took place in May 2018, Google decided to stop all advertising relating to the referendum on all of its advertising platforms, including AdWords and YouTube.
This followed decisions by Facebook to no longer accept advertising relating to the referendum funded by foreign organisations outside Ireland, and Twitter not allowing any advertising in relation to the…
Content type: News & Analysis
Photo by Jake Hills on UnsplashOur research has shown how some apps like Maya by Plackal Tech and MIA by Mobbap Development Limited were – at the time of the research – sharing your most intimate data about your sexual life and medical history with Facebook.Other apps like Mi Calendario, Ovulation Calculator by Pinkbird and Linchpin Health were letting Facebook know every time you open the app.We think companies like theses should do better and we are pleased to see some of them have already…
Content type: Long Read
In December 2018, Privacy international exposed the dubious practices of some of the most popular apps in the world.
Out of the 36 apps we tested, we found that 61% automatically transfer data to Facebook the moment a user opens the app. This happens whether the user has a Facebook account or not, and whether they are logged into Facebook or not. We also found that some of those apps routinely send Facebook incredibly detailed and sometimes sensitive personal data. Again, it didn’t matter if…
Content type: Examples
French website IVG.net, first Google result when typing IVG (Interuption Volontaire de Grossesse or abortion in french), has been exposed as being anti-abortion website spreading misinformation. Offering an official looking "Numero vert" (free to call phone number number), IVG.net attempts to convince pregnant women calling the service that abortion is a high risk operation which will have terrible impact on their health and personal life, pressuring women to not undertake such operation. The…
Content type: Long Read
Photo by David Werbrouck on Unsplash
This is an ongoing series about the ways in which those searching for abortion information and procedures are being traced and tracked online. This work is part of a broader programme of work aimed at safeguarding the dignity of people by challenging current power dynamics, and redefining our relationship with governments, companies, and within our own communities. As an enabling right, privacy plays an important role in supporting the exercise of…